Chapter 12: “Their Generation has a Voice that can Effect Change”: Challenges Interviewing and Constructing a Vignette of a Middle School Language Arts Teacher

My biographical work has most often focused on contemporary Black women children’s and young adult literature writers who are currently educators, or who have taught at some point, and view their award-winning texts for youth as educative (e.g., Hinton, 2004, 2009). However, about 5 years ago, I decided to write an educational biography of Bernadette Rodríguez, a middle-school language arts teacher. For me, this meant I would study and narrate an aspect of this teacher’s life representing “the daily give and take of teaching in classrooms and schools” (Smith, 1994, p. 301). I asked Bernadette to help me understand her approaches to teaching multicultural literature, particularly how she selects texts and teaching strategies and what she hopes her seventh graders learn from them. Teaching is Bernadette’s second career after serving in the military, and at the time, she had been teaching middle school language arts in a middle-class neighborhood in a large suburban school district in the South for 9 years, and she led the seventh-grade English teachers. I was particularly interested in Bernadette’s approach to teaching literature because I had worked with her before, including in a local writing project chapter we were active in a few years prior and in other projects, and I knew she had an affinity for teaching Black literature.