English Education - Volume 53, Issue 3, 2021

In this article, we examine a teacher candidate’s beliefs, teaching practices, and challenges to and supports for critical pedagogy during student teaching at an urban middle school. We also consider whether involvement in an ELA methods course influenced the teacher candidate’s beliefs and/or teaching practices, particularly regarding writing. Through this inquiry, we identify ways to better support teacher candidates in learning and enacting critical pedagogy in English language arts.

In this qualitative study, the authors explore how preservice teachers select, read, and imagine teaching representations of disability in young adult literature. Adding disability to the list of diversity categories can be problematic in that thinking about disability as a singular identity group ignores abling or disabling contexts and diversity within disability (Davis, 2011; Watson, 2002). However, findings indicate that preservice teachers may only see disability in the context of special education if representations of disability are not explicitly applied in English coursework using a disability studies lens (Dunn, 2014).

This article discusses activities and actions for English language arts (ELA) educators to engage in antiracist praxis and humanizing pedagogy through unpacking the common activity of classroom name introductions. The author highlights how learning students’ names can involve honoring nondominant histories of racially minoritized communities. Implications of this (re)active praxis include the potential to sustain marginalized students in ELA classrooms by promoting broader racial and linguistic justice.

In this lyrical reflective essay in four parts, I ruminate on teaching as poetics, the teaching of contemporary poetry, the teaching of histories of settler colonialism and antiblackness inherent in curriculum design, and teaching as adoration. I practice teaching to learn how to move with and love my students, to encourage them to move with and love their future students. I then reflect on my practice after and in between meditation, so the poetics here is an invitation to meditation.