English Education - Volume 56, Issue 2, 2024

Working in an English education teacher preparation program that emphasizes Muhammad’s (2020, 2023) culturally and historically responsive literacy model, three graduate teaching assistants sought to understand how teacher candidates (TCs) in the program take up the learning pursuit of criticality in their planning and teaching. In this article, the authors discuss findings and implications from a qualitative study examining how four TCs languaged their understandings and enactments of criticality. Findings show that TCs’ definitions of criticality shaped their practice, sometimes limiting it based on the compatibility of TCs’ curriculum or priorities with their understandings of criticality. In addition, TCs’ deficit-framing of their students was a factor in how TCs explained the ways they did or did not take up criticality in their teaching. Implications from the study suggest a need to attend to the ways TCs language their students and conceive of criticality to support uptake of criticality in TCs’ planning and instructional practices.

In this article, the author shares a research assignment used with English language arts preservice teachers in a methods course to prepare them to engage with the NCTE professional community. The author shares how preservice teachers self-selected research topics, designed classroom-ready teacher materials based on their research using NCTE journals, and shared this research using panel presentations in class.

In this essay, the author reflects on a preservice teacher who disagreed with the antiracist focus of a methods class but refused to express her views in front of her peers, suggesting that teacher educators may need to think harder about how to open spaces for divergent viewpoints on the worldview underlying antiracist pedagogy.

In this multiauthored piece, ELATE members dream about what could be in ELA teacher education, offering particular ideas, resources, theories, and activities that could help them realize their dreams.