English Education - Volume 54, Issue 2, 2022

This study investigated the experiences of preservice secondary English language arts (ELA) teacher candidates (n=12) as they attempted to complete their crucial student teaching field experience during the 2020–2021 pandemic crises. In addition, it looked at their university supervisors’ (n=3) experiences as they sought to mentor and guide the teacher candidates through a virtual environment. Findings indicated both positive and negative consequences for participants. Overall, the student teachers and university supervisors remained optimistic about the internship experience and found value in it. Yet the complexities of schedules, digital platforms, and expectations took a heavy toll with one student dropping out and another deciding to go to law school after finishing their education degree. Implications for supporting student teachers and mentors in virtual environments are included, along with recommendations for future research on promoting the cultivation of digital pedagogy in ELA preservice coursework.

This article documents the yearlong inquiry of a high school English teacher in New York City who participated in a networked professional learning community (PLC) of English educators exploring the question, “How do we engage students in remote and hybrid learning situations in the current sociopolitical context?” Forced to teach remotely, the teacher focused on building connections among her students, using their feedback as a primary tool to design and improve responsive instruction. Through participation in the PLC and feedback from her students, the teacher learned important lessons from others, with others, on behalf of her students, and about her own processes of learning and thinking. This teacher’s journey offers several lessons for teacher education, grounded in the influences of ecology and affective interactions on student engagement.

This study reveals the affordances and limitations of introducing a new instructional framework—archival-based pedagogy—into a digital literacies course for English language arts educators in the fall of 2020 in the midst of COVID-19. Its purpose was to document how seven students in the course went about choosing archival content for the podcasts they created as part of their final project. The conceptual framework of artifactual critical literacy guided the study’s methodology, analysis, and interpretation of the participants’ descriptions of how the archival artifacts they selected became centerpieces in their podcasts and reflected their personal and/or professional identities. Findings from the study are presented through the seven participants’ narrative reflections, created during the spring of 2021. Implications are discussed for furthering archival-based pedagogy as a curricular alternative to traditional online teaching and learning.

As English teacher educators who research and experiment with digital literacies in the classroom, we felt prepared for many of the pedagogical and technical aspects of the shift to emergency remote teaching. However, the realities of teaching and learning in a society under widespread, long-term stress illuminated the necessity of addressing the social and emotional toll of the pandemic in our teaching as well.

In this essay, three teacher educators explore their individual pandemic-imposed online “zippered borders” (Fine, 1994, p. 71). Their reflections on navigating the challenges that the past two years created for them and their students resulted in a deeper understanding of the hyphens of teaching various literacy and English language arts methods courses in a virtual setting. The authors’ respective journeys and collaborative sense-making of their commonalities provide critical insights and, perhaps, some inspiration for others to reflect and consider how our best efforts as teacher educators are still, always, in the hyphens.