English Education - Volume 46, Issue 2, 2014

Ethnically unfamiliar literature can provide opportunities for teacher candidates to expand their repertoire of available texts to better support students in their care. However,ethnically unfamiliar literatures can be difficult for readers to understand and appreciate. This article addresses this disconnect by infusing multicultural literature study among preservice teachers with the explicit examination of the literary aesthetic. Attention to literary aesthetics provided participants new literary language for analysis and response, the opportunity to apply existing analytical skills in new ways, cultural context to inform their analyses, and permission to admit deficiencies of knowledge or explore personal struggles.

This article offers both a rationale and a proposal for the meaningful contribution of English faculty to the preparation of English teachers. We draw on data from teacher licensure tests and interviews with English and English Education faculty to underscore contradictions among the various voices in English education and to identify ways of bringing English faculty more meaningfully into the conversation. While analysis of our quantitative data suggests correlations between Praxis II exams and other measures of candidates’ content knowledge and skills, analysis of interview transcripts and course documents reveals clear differences. We conclude with recommendations for involving English faculty in teacher preparation to balance out the contradictory and dominant voices in English education.

Authors Roark Mulligan and Kay Dawson describe a project in which preservice teachers worked in primary grade classrooms, focusing on mentoring young children in writing. In spite of the authors’ initial fears that preservice teachers would find these experiences irrelevant, the authors found that the preservice teachers “witnessed a rapidity of development that could not be observed on any other grade level.”

Peter Smagorinsky presents a new proposal for teacher evaluation in his article. His suggestion is quite appropriate for our times: “Assessing teachers according to what effective teachers do, rather than according to which assessment means are most cost-effective and most amenable to reduction to single scores, seems appropriate.”