English Education - Volume 45, Issue 1, 2012

This article describes a writing partnership that involved university preservice teachers and ninthgradestudents enrolled in an integrated social studies/language arts class. While the high schoolstudents found the experience exciting and satisfying, the preservice teachers expressed anxietiesand concerns as they endeavored to foster academic literacies. We conclude with reflections onthe challenges of preparing a new generation of English educators to teach writing in rich andmeaningful ways where they have not themselves benefited from such experiences in their own “apprenticeships of observation.”

In this article, we address how websites intended for ELA teachers encourage user participation and what kinds of English education these sites promote or exclude. We selected sites based on assumptions drawn from interactional sociolinguistics as well as additional criteria that developed during our search. Our analysis focuseson the George Lucas Foundation’s Edutopia.org as a central example, as well as five other sites with various similar features. Together, these sites promote a progressive, situated, project-based vision of English teaching, and they may serve as both venues and models for how English teacher educators who share that vision can reach a broader audience.

We offer this article to support ELA and other subject-area teachers as they think about why disciplinary literacy teaching is important and how to enact it in robust ways. We argue that it is critical for the improvement of students’ academic literacy development and overall learning that all teachers and literacy researchers attend to the teaching of disciplinary literacy in every subject area.