How Teachers Understand Literacy Learning

Learning is the transformation of participation in cultural practice. This is as true for teachers as it is for students. Teachers' understandings of literacy and disability are not fixed dispositions. They are learned, historically produced, and therefore open to redesign. This line of inquiry asks how teachers come to understand literacy and disability the way they do, and how professional learning can be designed to transform those understandings rather than merely add to them.

Critical reflection is the signature practice of this research program. It is the designed activity through which teachers examine the cultural and historical sources of their own understandings of literacy and disability, and revise them. Critical reflection is everywhere in teacher education and almost nowhere well-defined. Too often it is reduced to a generic technique. Drawing on the learning sciences, cultural-historical activity theory, and critical disability studies, this line of inquiry re-conceptualizes critical reflection as an emancipatory practice. That practice requires historical knowledge to incite critique. It requires dialogue to sustain critique. And it requires concrete tools to enact it.

The projects here take up that work in sequence. A systematic review consolidates what the field knows about critical reflection in teacher education. It uses cultural-historical activity theory to organize a fragmented literature into a coherent account of how the practice works. A conceptual piece confronts the erasure of disability history from teacher preparation. Teachers cannot critique what they have never been taught to see, and historical consciousness is a precondition for emancipatory praxis. The newest frontier extends critical reflection to the AI systems entering classrooms. It positions teachers as knowledge workers whose reflective critique can keep algorithmic tools from quietly encoding ableism into instructional decisions.

Systematic literature review · From technique to emancipatory practice: Re-conceptualizing critical reflection for disability equity in teacher preparation and professional learning · Teaching and Teacher Education, 2026.

Critical reflection is invoked across teacher education as essential. It is defined almost nowhere with precision. This systematic review consolidates the empirical literature on critical reflection in teacher learning. It asks what the practice actually is, how it has been designed and studied, and what it produces in teachers' understanding, noticing, and instruction.

The review's contribution is both substantive and methodological. Rather than cataloguing studies thematically, I used cultural-historical activity theory as an organizing framework. I mapped findings onto the elements of the activity system: subjects, tools, community, rules, division of labor, and object. This mapping reveals how critical reflection functions as a designed activity rather than an individual disposition. The approach makes visible what conventional syntheses obscure. The outcomes of critical reflection depend on the mediational tools, dialogic structures, and historical knowledge that organize it.

The review grounds this research program's larger argument. Critical reflection, properly conceptualized as an emancipatory practice, can be deliberately designed through tools like journey mapping, historical self-mapping, and structured reflection protocols, and its effects on teachers' praxis can be studied.

Teachers as knowledge workers: Critical reflection and theoretical literacy as guards against algorithmic ableism · Under review

AI systems are entering classrooms faster than the field's capacity to critique them. These tools are trained on normative data and optimized for efficiency. They carry ableist logics into instructional decisions. They recommend remediation over meaning-making. They flag difference as deficit. They encode narrow constructions of what counts as reading, writing, and progress. Left unexamined, algorithmic tools do not merely assist instruction. They participate in it, quietly reorganizing the activity systems in which teachers work.

This article argues that teachers should not be positioned as passive implementers of algorithmic output. Teachers are knowledge workers. Their situated, cultural, and historical knowledge of their students constitutes expertise that no model can replicate. The article extends this research program's conceptualization of critical reflection. The same practice teachers use to examine the cultural-historical sources of their own understandings can be turned toward the tools entering their classrooms. Teachers can interrogate what an AI system assumes about literacy and disability, whose knowledge it privileges, and what it renders invisible. Critical reflection becomes the mechanism by which teachers retain epistemic authority over instructional decisions. It is also how algorithmic ableism is made visible before it is made routine.

The stakes are precisely those animating this line of inquiry. Understandings of literacy and disability are learned and can be redesigned. The urgent task is ensuring that machines do not do the teaching of those understandings unexamined.

The erasure of disability history: Implications for teacher professional identity and praxis · Under review

Teachers cannot critique what they have never been taught to see. Disability history is the institutional, legal, and cultural record of how disabled people have been segregated, constructed, and resisted. It is almost entirely absent from teacher preparation. This study examines that absence not as an oversight but as an erasure with colonial roots. It is a patterned, produced silence that does ideological work.

The study draws on data from a semester-long qualitative partnership with teachers of students with disabilities. It is guided by critical disability studies, decolonial theory, and cultural-historical activity theory. The study documents the erasure as it lives in teachers themselves: the histories they were never taught, the gaps and silences in their preparation, and the taken-for-granted understandings of disability that fill the space where historical knowledge should be. The analysis traces how this absence is not neutral. In the vacuum left by erased history, colonial and deficit logics circulate unchallenged. They sediment into teachers' identities and instructional decisions without ever being examined.

The argument carries direct implications for teacher education. Historical consciousness is not enrichment. It is precondition. Naming the erasure is the first act of critique. Restoring the histories that teacher preparation has withheld is a precondition for emancipatory praxis with students with disabilities.