English Education - Volume 54, Issue 1, 2021

Teacher-as-writer experiences, in which teacher candidates engage deeply in their own writing and consider its implications for their pedagogies, are common features of writing methods courses. However, most existing research on these assignments has focused on the experiences of educators who write and will teach exclusively in English. We explore the experiences of bilingual teacher candidates who engaged in a teacher-as-writer assignment in our writing methods course, which we redesigned through the lens of translanguaging pedagogies (García et al., 2016). Drawing on theories of translanguaging (García, 2009) and raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015), we describe how two teacher candidates experienced invitations to compose across languages in ways that were simultaneously empowering and complicated. Ultimately, through this article, we seek to bring needed recognition of linguistic and racial diversity to discussions of teacher-as-writer experiences and to highlight the pedagogical potential of translanguaging in writing teacher education.

In this article, the three co-chairs of the 2019–2021 Steering Committee for the English Language Arts (ELA) 7–12 Preparation Standards share the history, development, and meaning of the recently adopted 2021 NCTE Standards for the Initial Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts 7–12 (Initial Licensure).

In this essay, Christian Z. Goering shares his reaction to the new NCTE Standards for the Initial Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts 7–12 (Initial Licensure) as co-chair of the 2019–2021 NCTE Steering Committee for the ELA 7–12 Preparation Standards, past chair of ELATE, and current teacher educator. Believing that these standards have the ability to challenge and change what it means to teach ELA, he considers how students, faculty, and the field can take up and embrace antiracist/antibias instruction. Editor’s note: Goering originally contributed this piece in October 2020, then revised it in October 2021 in preparation for the official release of the new standards.