English Education - Volume 41, Issue 1, 2008

This issue of English Education examines efforts to support English teachers’ development of classroom discussion practices. The featured articles explore how teacher educators and university researchers work with preservice and in-service teachers to create dialogic spaces within and across university teacher education and secondary English classrooms to support this development.

This article considers the benefits and challenges of using English teacher candidates’ videotaped discussions of literature as tools to facilitate authentic and engaging discussions of literature. More specifically, this article examines the use of teacher candidates’ videotaped discussions in a secondary English methods course to expand candidates’ conceptions of both the purposes of discussion in the secondary English classroom and the teacher’s role in them.

This article examines how secondary English teachers serving as preservice mentors developed pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of literature discussions by participating in a cross-institutional teacher educator network. The joint creation of dialogic space in the English Educators’ Network provided a context where mentor teachers expanded their understandings of discussions to a dialogic view of literature-based discussion involving the interaction of reader, text, and multiple worldviews.

As former middle and high school English teachers, secondary English teacher educators, and educational researchers, the authors were challenged to negotiate the worlds of their research center and the various schools where they worked with teachers. They used the CLASS system to mediate meetings between researchers and teachers participating in the CELA Partnership for Literacy study and learned that research tools can become “boundary objects” that facilitate movement between discourses.