Using Linked Text Sets to Promote Advocacy and Agency Through a Critical Lens

The author shares three preservice teachers’ linked text sets, including young adult literature and other media forms, and their critiques of the linked text sets, centering on a self‐selected social justice topic: racism and the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, rape culture, and ending the stigma behind mental health. The author ends with discussion of how the preservice teachers felt advocacy and agency through creating and then critiquing their linked text sets and what recognizing their implicit biases means to their future students and teaching. The author hopes that by sharing what these three preservice teachers found in their critiques of their work, other educators may be able to not only use these text sets and suggested text additions and create new linked text sets for their students, but also think about their own curricular decisions through a critical lens.