Every semester, we conclude our courses with grades, reflections, and the quiet hope that, somehow, what we have taught will show up later in our students’ lives, when they actually need the information, when it will actually count. In teacher education, that’s not wishful thinking. It’s literally the job. It is impossible to even conceive of teaching students to perform literacy pedagogy perfectly by the end of finals week; rather, we teach them to use literacy pedagogy when the stakes are real, when they’re sitting across from a child with reading difficulties.
