English Education - Volume 55, Issue 2, 2023

In this article, I consider how pre- and inservice educators notice texts they enjoy in their daily lived experiences and how this positioning may support an attention to equity-oriented English education. I focus on texts that educators working in professional roles, ranging from literacy coaches to elementary and secondary ELA teachers to administrators, notice in their daily experiences. Drawing on a curricular assignment in a writing pedagogy course, I consider how educators relate the texts they find interesting to their own understanding of equity-oriented writing instruction. I examine for how teachers consider the texts of their lives and how such attentiveness might help them build humanizing, equity-oriented curriculum with and for students. I also seek to disrupt the overwhelming emphasis on writing as what is needed to pass a standardized assessment. This alignment toward enjoyment may support English educators as they, in turn, support and view students and their languages and literacies as worthy and brilliant.

To understand trends in what seems to be an explosion of books written about young adult literature (YAL), the authors conducted a content analysis of scholarly books published between 2000 and 2020. The question What trends in YAL research and pedagogy do the books published in this span of time reflect? guided this inquiry to support English teacher educators in their engagement with YAL scholarship within and beyond teacher preparation. After examining 191 books, with the majority of them focusing on research and theory in YAL, findings emerged in five areas: critical events in society, shifts in public education, literacy movements, publishing trends, and scholarly community influence.

In this article, we reflect on the potential of involving preservice teachers in pedagogical experiences with community-based organizations to cultivate all students’ genius and criticality (Muhammad, 2020). Drawing on our (re)active praxis as teacher educators, we examine our work with two preservice ELA teachers who planned and taught a critical literacy curriculum at a community-based site. By (re)imagining teacher education beyond traditional university and school classroom walls, we consider the possibilities of bridging university-community contexts to develop our own implementation of critical pedagogies.