English Education - Volume 51, Issue 1, 2018

Within this qualitative case study, I describe how a fifth-grade teacher in an affluent and culturally homogenous school attempted to “disturb the waters” through teaching global literature. Framed by transactional theories of response and critical language awareness, I identify three central pedagogical moves that supported disruptions of students’ assumptions and beliefs: (1) inviting students to share their aesthetic transactions, (2) privileging multiple perspectives and genres, and (3) calling attention to language choices as a central line of inquiry. I argue that both transactional and critical approaches to literacy and language are necessary in order to move students beyond disinterested and prejudicial responses to global literature and to challenge commonly held beliefs.

This case study of two secondary English teachers integrates a critical translingual approach in two urban classrooms. Our inquiry is guided by two questions: (1) How did two teachers engage critical translingual approaches in their classrooms? (2) How did their positionalities shape implementation of these approaches? This article illustrates how teachers’ stances and practices can be affected by their identities, pointing to the ways that diverse teachers must approach their translanguaging pedagogies with an understanding of raciolinguistic ideologies. We end with a call for teacher educators to help teachers engage the transgressive elements of translanguaging in English classrooms and hone their raciolinguistic literacies so that they can design classroom learning in more humanizing ways.

This article raises questions about the role of NCTE in an era of widespread education reform that often runs counter to a wide body of scholarship and members’ understandings of ways to build strong, equitable educational systems. The authors call on NCTE to reinvent itself primarily as a space from which to take action toward equity and justice. This provocateur piece offers a loving critique of NCTE’s notion of advocacy at a time when neoliberal education reforms limit educators’ capacity to carry out our collective responsibilities to marginalized and vulnerable youth.

This essay is an invited response to Noah Asher Golden and Deborah Bieler’s Provocateur Piece in this issue in which they share a loving critique of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). This response highlights and extends Golden and Bieler’s observation about “the strengths of our members: policy, practice, and dialogue.” The response essay illustrates how NCTE, an association for literacy educators, could use “policy, practice, and dialogue” as a framework to drive and connect its work.

The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have each cast light on the prevalence of sexual harassment in a variety of media industries. In this piece, I reflect on a college YAL seminar in which my students read Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The class discussion quickly became focused on Alexie himself and his surrounding accusations and subsequent admission of sexual misconduct. This piece seeks to catalog our conversation in hopes that as teachers, we may come to our own conclusions about silence, voice, choice, and when we can or should ever judge characters in art by the character of the artist.