Many teacher education programs provide teachers with opportunities to read, write, and discuss critical pedagogy, with the hope that such work will allow them to develop more equitable and just teaching practices. Yet, there often remains a gap between the theoretical discussions of teaching and learning in teacher education classrooms and the…

In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of third graders' experiences with a unit from their district-mandated commercial reading curriculum in which the children made strong connections between a fictional account of a Depression-era farm family's economic hardships and their own 21st century lives in a city with one of the highest…