English Education - Volume 39, Issue 3, 2007

Over the last two years, the work of the CEE-GS has included the establishment of the organization, participation in the CEE leadership summit in May 2005, a panel discussion about PhD student issues at last year’s NCTE conference, and the establishment of a CEE-GS executive committee. Potential future pursuits include the development of a CEE-GS strand or forum at the NCTE national convention, representation on various NCTE and CEE committees, web-based communication among all members across the country, and publishing opportunities to discuss the organization and the issues it addresses.

Preservice teachers often enter English language arts teacher preparation courses with untapped fears of writing and teaching writing due to null or bad experiences as K-12 students. In this article, I follow two preservice elementary teachers through a semester long methods course and reveal how they developed positive, clear images of themselves as writing teachers through active reflection and engagement in the course.

How do teachers in diverse classrooms enact a transactional mode of literary response in their orchestration of classroom conversations about literature? This paper proposes that a theory of expressive language is central to answering this question and that the discourse genre of oral narratives may hold critically importance in accomplishing this challenge.

My goal of reading this particular young adult piece with a group of graduate students is to better understand the experience of what it means to be an immigrant and to explore how educators across diverse content areas should invite English language learning (ELL) students into their classrooms.