English Education - Volume 56, Issue 3, 2024

This year-long ethnographic study explores how two ELA preservice teachers of color enacted pedagogies of abolitionist praxis—centering teaching and learning to and through an abolitionist praxis of identifying and dismantling surveillance, criminalization, and punishment—via the areas of curriculum and instruction, relational work, and organizing and activism. When enacting pedagogies of abolitionist praxis, with specific attention to curriculum and instruction, three findings were identified. First, both teachers purposely and strategically designed their curriculum and instruction to explicitly teach an abolitionist praxis, yet they did so via distinct approaches. Next, the teachers rooted their curriculum and instruction in a radical Black, Indigenous, and feminist imaginary to teach about but, more importantly, teach against carceral practices, policies, and ideologies. Last, both teachers facilitated youth-led action research projects that centered present and future world-building actions. This study provides implications for the education and support of preservice teachers and for K–12 teacher practice.

This qualitative case study examines preservice teachers’ (PTs) self-selected writer’s notebook (WNB) entries and written reflections in two literacy methods courses. The authors use thematic analysis to consider how the writer’s notebooks supported PTs’ learning to teach multilingual writers while concurrently writing for themselves and navigating contemporary sociopolitical contexts. The authors describe how PTs used their writer’s notebooks to process emotion and identity, develop professional stances, and build experiential knowledge around multilingual, multimodal writer praxis. The authors conclude with suggestions for teacher educators and researchers to expand these practices.

This (Re)Active Praxis essay centers on the collaborative revision of two English language arts teacher education courses—one on literature and drama and the other on writing and language—in a state experiencing aggressive legislation against practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion that impacts teacher education preparing students to design justice-oriented education. Two objectives framed this collaborative course revision: to deliver critical teacher preparation grounded in cultural relevance and justice orientations and to design courses that integrate and demonstrate conceptual and instructional relationships between reading and writing. The authors share and reflect on their experiences and process of collaboratively revising the courses, offering a heuristic derived from their decision-making to increase or improve ways education courses support preservice teachers’ opportunities to learn and teach literacy in culturally responsive, justice-oriented classrooms.

I take up a practitioner inquiry stance to examine a wobble I experienced while conducting research with ELA preservice teachers. Drawing on Garcia and O’Donnell-Allen’s Pose, Wobble, Flow framework (2015), I consider how my research design and pose as a justice-oriented teacher educator led me to wobble when participants agreed on a potentially problematic idea. Resisting and interrogating binaries of right/wrong and good/bad, I speculatively (re)imagine the possibilities of my interactions with the ELA PSTs. Sharing these speculative (re)imaginings of wobbles in teacher education can function to deepen and make more flexible our individual poses and make visible just collective educational futures.