English Education - Volume 40, Issue 4, 2008

With the retirements of John Mayher, Marilyn Sobelman, and Gordon Pradl, the NYU program in English education marks the end of an era. To reflect on and celebrate that legacy, we organized a session at, appropriately, the New York Convention of NCTE in November 2007. Featuring the retiring faculty and a random collection of our alumni, the session was celebration, reunion, and sober reflection on the past present and future of NYU’s program.

Examining the sociocultural hierarchies implicit in the ways in which texts are positioned in and out of classrooms may significantly broaden our ability to ask questions about texts and power—the heart of the English education mission “to envision a more democratic and just society” (Alsup, Emig, Pradl, Tremmel, & Yagelski, 2006, p. 281). To ignore these positions risks a significant silence regarding the ways in which texts live in and shape the world.

This article provides critical feedback to teacher educators not only on general literacy and technology issues but also firsthand experiences implementing a hypermedia, video-based environment in university courses. This article also presents some of the challenges that individuals might face when integrating hypermedia, video-based tools such as Reading Classroom Explorer (RCE) into classrooms.

There is substantial evidence that children and adolescents learn more in dialogic environments and have a deeper understanding of what they read. But looking beyond these measures for student performance (which are helpful in quelling the concerns of those who sound the drumbeat for standards-based instruction), we believe there are strong philosophical reasons for establishing classroom contexts in which students’ voices shape the direction of subsequent learning.