English Education - Volume 48, Issue 1, 2015

In addition to being one of the authors of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), David Colemanhas become the Standards’ “most visible advocate” (Smith, Appleman, & Wilhelm, 2014, p. 10) and one of their “most prominent and articulate promoters” (Rabinowitz & Bancroft, 2014, p. 4). Ina talk titled “Bringing the Common Core to Life,” delivered to the New York State Department of Education, Coleman (2011) moves beyond promoting the CCSS to explaining and modeling his vision of “what we must do” (p. 16) when teaching complex, informational texts. This article illuminates the regressive nature of Coleman’s pedagogical prescriptions by juxtaposing them with the more progressive approaches to literary education proposed by John Dewey and by referring to research that demonstrates the deleterious effects of the strategies Coleman advocates.

This case study explores an urban secondary literacy teacher’s involvement in communities of inquiry over time. I draw on data from a multiyear study that documented the intellectual work of a community of teacher candidates I worked with as an instructor in a literacy methods course and cofounder of an inquiry community they participated in during their first two years in the classroom. Using document analysis and interviews with the focal teacher, Laura, conducted five years after the initial study, I explore how participation in critical inquiry-based teacher education and teacher research communities in her early years in the classroom led Laura to initiate change-oriented collaborations in her ongoing professional practice. I conclude with a discussion of how inquiry can support preservice and inservice teachers—particularly those working in embattled and underfunded urban schools in a time of heightened accountability—to develop activist orientations toward educational policy, critical solidarity with peers, and relational approaches to educating diverse students.

This provocation explores the abjective e/affects of white ideology manifested as school language in the United States. Through recursive engagement and symbolic play with her memory of watching a student eat toilet paper during a College Essay Writing class, the author challenges the institutional grammars that shape a collective sense of “school.” Through a critical analysis of the shared “public transcript” (Scott, 1990) of many urban schools, the author considers the ways in which students and teachers get summoned into particular social existences in relation to whiteness as the dominant culture of power. She uses both written and visual languages to offer poetryas a site of theory towards reinscribing the relationship between language, feeling, and address in the urban English classroom and inciting new, socially just structures of learning. The author’s sketches of this memory drawn with ink on toilet paper intervene throughout the article, giving her provocation an added dimensionality.