English Education - Volume 55, Issue 3, 2023

Reading moments of classroom talk as text, we explored how prospective teachers in a Teaching Diverse Young Adult Literature course read and responded to Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores, a text with a Muslim LGBTQIA+ theme. Thinking with queer theory—and its constituent concept, homonationalism, more specifically—we examined how discourses of difference, both liberatory and oppressive, were shaped as notions of collective acceptance, tolerance, and inclusion intersected with interpersonal contradictions and contingencies. Using critical discourse analysis to trace how the “queer, Muslim other” was indexed in conversation, we highlight the promises and pitfalls of leveraging diverse youth literature as students examined and extended the privilege of personhood through the particulars of a single text.

In this essay, two English teacher educators detail a two-year inquiry process in which they worked to frame curriculum and instruction in secondary reading methods around the development of social imagination: the ability to engage imaginatively with the perspectives of others and to envision more just ways of being in the world. In the curricular approach detailed here, preservice teachers developed social imagination by reading not only the words on the page but also the world around them, attending to the ways in which other readers make meaning within their reading community. In this way, classroom communities and intellectual partnerships become central to the teaching of reading and literature in English classrooms and serve as starting points for envisioning new ways of being in schools. The authors describe one particular classroom lesson in depth and discuss the connection between reading pedagogy in English and the imagination of more democratic and equitable classroom spaces.

In this essay, two English language arts teacher educators reflect on their efforts to live out a queer anti-oppressive pedagogy and explore tensions in navigating emotionality and discomfort.

Various English educators consider what the advent of “intelligent” technology means for ELA education and the ongoing pursuit of equity and justice.