English Education - Volume 55, Issue 4, 2023

This is a lightly edited version of the address given by Tonya B. Perry at the ELATE Summer Conference on July 7, 2023, at Georgia State University, Atlanta.

Informed by AsianCrit, sociocultural literacy studies, and solidarity scholarship, this article examines how an Indian American woman scholar-practitioner and eight Indonesian American girls collectively engaged with civic learning in an out-of-school critical English education space. The researcher offers the construct of solidarity-as-project by tracing examples of how the facilitator and participants crossed boundaries of identity and experience to interdependently learn about and centralize Asian American civic legacies. The researcher also considers the complications of power and diversity in those co-learning processes. The article concludes with recommendations for how English teacher education can orient teacher candidates toward enacting solidarity-as-project alongside Asian American girls and young women.

In the midst of quickly changing education legislation, English education teacher educators must consider how to prepare teacher candidates with a full understanding of new, restrictive legislation as they design and implement instruction upholding NCTE’s standards for antiracist/antibias instruction while protecting themselves from school-level discipline and/or state-level legal implications. In this essay, a teacher educator reflects on these conflicts in relation to her own practice and how she has made curricular changes to engage her students in this work.

In this essay, the author reflects on his experience as a short-term substitute teacher in a high school English classroom. He considers the personal and professional tensions that led him there, the impact of his time in the classroom, and the potential it offered to identify and navigate the teacher educators’ “radical preferences” that might occasionally need sharpening.