English Education - Volume 54, Issue 4, 2022

This study examines ways preservice teachers transfer their developing agentive identities—specifically around race/ism, inequity, and whiteness—from the teacher education context to secondary English language arts classrooms, as well as barriers preventing that transfer. This inquiry utilized qualitative case study methods to conduct in-depth analysis of six ELA preservice teachers’ written reflections, class discussions, and student-instructor conferences. While the preservice teachers showed evidence of developing “theoretical agency” in the teacher education context, they often struggled to maintain their agentive poses within secondary ELA contexts. Their struggles manifest as hesitancy connected to their awareness of and navigation of their own whiteness. Findings suggest preservice teachers need opportunities to interrogate whiteness through curricula and structural inequities and to engage in agency development across a variety of contexts.

This study explores the experiences of one cohort of secondary English preservice teachers (PSTs) learning to facilitate text-based discussions during a methods course. The authors analyze how the use of a Common Core-aligned instructional text and mixed-reality simulations support PSTs in developing discussion facilitation skills. Implications highlight that teacher educators need to examine their timing of approximations in teacher education programs and explain how simulated environments are intentionally used for PSTs to refine their practice.

English language arts scholarship has suggested literacy classrooms should be inclusive of both teachers’ and students’ grief and loss experiences; however, teachers’ grieving experiences remain understudied. This article analyzes seven in-depth interviews in order to understand ELA teachers’ experiences of teaching while grieving a death, finding that ELA teachers navigating personal loss perceived particular rules for fulfilling relational work in teaching: hiding certain negative emotions, navigating the teacher role, and foregrounding students’ learning needs. Creating ELA classrooms inclusive of trauma and loss experiences requires teacher educators to attend to the interplay of teachers’ conceptions of relational work and their experiences and emotions related to loss.

This reflective essay explores three graduate students’ experiences hosting an antiracist teaching book club with preservice English language arts teachers in the spring of 2021. The book club centered on practical advice for engaging secondary students through antiracist pedagogies while meeting the expectations placed on new teachers. Through reflection, the authors found the book club opened a space for critical conversations on their own responsibilities as antiracist educators.

Amid a time of social protest against systemic racism, the author recalls an experience of her own racism as a white literacy researcher and ELA educator. She acknowledges and describes her racism as both a means to redesign teaching practice and an invitation to other ELA educators to allow the discomfort that can come with reflection. Drawing on Bettina Love’s articulation of abolitionist teaching, as well as scholars in critical English pedagogy and critical literacies, the author focuses on the problem of segregated knowledge flows and shares ways in which she is disrupting this systematic tendency.