English Journal - Volume 114, Issue 6, 2025

This column shares the perspectives and experiences of a current high school English language arts teacher and provides action steps for (re)discovering joy in teaching.

In this essay, Gholdy Muhammad conceptualizes joy in literacy education by centering the artful language of the poet Rumi.

This article shares a rationale for teaching joyful literacies and provides insight into a teacher and students’ joyful experiences analyzing self-selected pop culture trends.

Three educator-scholars share methods for centering joy through racial literacy practices in the secondary classroom.

This article amplifies the authors’ personal narratives as men of color and veteran educators, illustrating how joy can serve as an act of resistance while demonstrating how teachers can use their stories to reflect, enhance literacy instruction, and cultivate spaces of bravery and healing through brotherhood, solidarity, and radical love.

This article emphasizes the significance of fostering joy in English classrooms, arguing that it can serve as a healing, liberating force and a targeted pedagogical pursuit.

In this article, a Black male English educator and White female middle school English language arts teacher share insights from their cross-racial collaborative practitionerinquiry on a White teacher’s Hip Hop pedagogies with non-Black students.

A drama educator and a high school English language arts teacher use drama-based pedagogy to promote criticality and joy in a literature unit on Nella Larsen’s Passing.

This account of practitioner research provides insight into a teacher and a literacy coach’s use of dramabased pedagogies to bring joy to a required curriculum.

Two authors draw from an African worldview and present the Elder stance as a disposition that nurtures communal wellbeing, cultural heritage work, and spirituality as foundational practices for cultivating joy.

An English educator reflects on the importance, relevance, and impact of designing and implementing a curriculum focused on Black American music as primary text.

Two teachers’ experiences in NCTE’s This Story Matters Teacher Corps speak to the power of professional community in advocating for the right to read and invigorating their teaching practice.

An early career teacher shares her story, describing how her school’s mission, her students, her convention experiences, and a support group for educators of color have kept her renewed and recharged in her commitment to English language arts teaching.

This critical curation examines young adult literature written by Asian American and Pacific Islander authors and featuring AAPI characters.

The authors describe how youth participatory action research fostered opportunities for youth and elders to engage in community-centered activism and reshape personal and collective identities.

This column recommends strategies for evaluating and including authentic representations of neurodivergence in young adult literature to honor neurodiversity as a natural form of human variation.