English Education - Volume 58, Issue 1, 2025

Outside their classrooms, teachers ask questions about texts because they feel curious. Inside the classroom, teachers’ questions about texts can become untethered from curiosity. In this article, the authors pursue their own curiosity and encourage teacher educators and teacher candidates to explore what happens when teachers’ text-based questions are motivated by genuine curiosity. They first explore how historical practices and current constraints keep teachers from exercising curiosity in the classroom while enforcing a mind/body split that diminishes the teaching experience. They then draw from a study of instructional rehearsals to compare the types of questions asked by teachers in different roles before suggesting that teachers’ experiences of everyday feelings of curiosity are central to classroom teaching. Lastly, the authors offer ways that teacher educators can help teachers value and recover their feelings of curiosity in the classroom.

This article examines how two bilingual, early career, Latina/o secondary teachers discuss their positional identities and related social markers in relation to pedagogical goals and teacher identities and how positionality influences the construction of their digital writing pedagogies. The article highlights how teacher educators can help developing teachers build resilient professional identities and connections to innovative pedagogical practices, like digital writing, through attention to positional identities.

In the current sociopolitical climate of book banning and censorship, English language arts (ELA) teachers and teacher educators face renewed urgency to disrupt and interrogate the traditional literary canon. This article explores a significant barrier to critical canon pedagogy: a generational semantic shift in the meaning of the term canon. Drawing from the lived experiences of a millennial teacher educator and her Gen Z “interpreter,” the authors examine how preservice teachers, influenced by digital fandom cultures, understand the concepts of canon, headcanon, and canon events in ways that diverge from the conceptualizations in our discipline. The authors reveal both the disconnect and the pedagogical possibilities in this shift, arguing to leverage Gen Z’s fan-driven meaning-making practices to reframe canon disruption.

This article uses a photo of the author’s first preservice teacher cohort, now in their sixteenth year of teaching, and a poem by William Carlos Williams as lenses to reflect on current challenges preservice teacher educators face. The author offers potential for moving forward by insisting on continuing to offer opportunities for reading, writing, and creating even as political storms rage.