English Education - Volume 50, Issue 3, 2018

This study presents a portrait of a White high school English teacher in an effort to understand the relationship between her White racial identity and her teaching about racism within a unit on A Raisin in the Sun in a predominantly White teaching context. The author argues that the teacher’s ambivalent White racial identity contributed to lack of clarity and conviction in terms of purpose, which presented a pedagogical dilemma that ultimately undermined her practice. Acknowledging ambivalent identity and compensating for ambivalence in practice could provide pedagogical support for English teachers when they strive to teach about racism in secondary English classrooms.

This research examined how preservice teachers in a university classroom used discourse analysis of video-recorded lessons to explore how identity markers such as race shaped classroom interactions. Findings from the study indicated that preservice teachers employed 10 different discursive strategies to engage in critical conversations. Identifying these discursive strategies offered insight into preservice teachers’ entry points for engaging in such dialogue. From that information, we offer potential narrative starters and questions that educators could use to deepen critical conversations in their English education courses.

This provocation addresses the prevalence of “scholarly laziness” in academic reading and considers its effect on scholarly writing in ELA and teacher education classrooms. The essay is constructed as twelve theses (a nod to the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and the contemporary propagation of standardized rubrics as doctrine). Blending narrative and scholarship, these brief statements consider possible reasons for this so-called laziness, ways it manifests in education and scholarship, why it is a problem, and possible approaches to encouraging more critical reading and writing practices among students, preservice teachers, and scholars.