English Education - Volume 51, Issue 4, 2019

This article explores the practice-linked identity resources offered to preservice ELA teachers as they moved through a teacher preparation program. Nasir and Cooks’s (2009) concepts of ideational, material, and relational resources are used as a frame to analyze the way preservice teachers talked about teaching writing at three points during their teacher preparation program. The study concludes that a narrow vision of the teaching of writing persists in the imagination of preservice teachers and in their secondary public school internship placements, rendering it difficult for teacher education programs to foster an alternate vision of what a writing teacher is or could be.

What might happen if teachers instruct youth directly about historically situated views of adolescence? This 10-week qualitative study examines what happened when a Black Jamaican English teacher instructed Black and Latino seniors in AP English about adolescence as a construct and guided them to apply this sociocultural lens of youth to texts in English class and to their lives. Using scholarship based in critical youth studies and Butler’s theory of performativity, this study shows the effects of giving students access to alternative discourses about adolescence. This study contributes to scholarship focused on centralizing youths’ interests in literature curriculum, for the purposes of increased literacy engagement.

How might English educators respond to the increasing need for advocacy associated with climate change and ecological sustainability? As alternatives to these stories of isolation and despair, I offer empowerment strategies based in Dr. Joanna Macy’s “The Work that Reconnects,” which emerges from her 30 years of environmental advocacy. In contrast with other calls to social and political activism, action is the last stage of this four-step, spiral approach that includes coming from gratitude, honoring our pain for the world, seeing with new eyes, and going forth.