English Journal - Volume 114, Issue 4, 2025

This column features an interview with NCTE caucus leaders who share hopes and challenges related to policy.

Educators need to dispel common reading myths and foster flexible, positive attitudes toward reading as an intellectual engagement, rather than letting students succumb to defeatist mindsets.

Two professors share what they have learned from teachers about how they have tried to talk back to anti–critical race theory policies.

An English teacher examines aesthetic reading and writing to explore controversial ideas in the rhetoric of popular culture as a method for standing against policies that constrict freedoms to read and freedoms to teach.

This article draws attention to the missing voices of multilingual learners in reading policy, explicitly highlighting the importance of implementing learner-centered English language instructional policies.

The author discusses strategies learned from secondary ELA teachers in Georgia for maintaining commitments to justice and equity-oriented pedagogies, despite educational legislation that poses a challenge to those practices.

In this article, the authors present ways for teachers to support students’ close viewing and critical analysis of PragerU’s multimodal content, and to help students identify the powerful messages embedded in media content.

Using state standards in social studies / history and narrative nonfiction, teachers and their students are able to use ELA skills to study the evolution of issues over time, instead of avoiding controversial issues.

While current ELA policies cast a shadow over educational practices, this article highlights the twilight of possibility within the darkness, exploring how three early career English teachers navigate these challenges by employing humanizing literacy pedagogies to bring light and positivity back into their classrooms.

The author shares a glimpse of her time with Justine, a Congolese newcomer, who exemplifies the linguistic diversity and strengths of adolescent newcomers in English-dominant high school spaces.

Given recent restrictive education laws, the authors propose implementing testimonio as pedagogy as a liberatory writing genre for secondary students to explore their lived experiences and intentionally articulate a call to action.

This article discusses the results of a survey of Texas teachers on their diverse book usage and provides suggestions on how to further diversify text lists.

This critical curation examines young adult literature grounded in the traditions of HipHop and punk music.

Trauma-informed pedagogy offers strategies to support LGBTQIA+ students, even when teachers navigate anti-LGBTQIA+ mandates.

Teaching disability identity, history, and culture in ELA classrooms has the potential to combat ableism and create authentic classroom communities of acceptance, love, and joy.