Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 60, Issue 1, 2025

Research underscores how working-class individuals “disidentify” (Skeggs, 1997) from working-class identities because of the impact of degrading, victim-blaming views of poverty in dominant discourses and in teacher thinking (Gorski, 2016). Contrastingly, a subset of working-class students in this preservice, young adult literature (YAL) course for English language arts (ELA) teachers took up the social class literacy curriculum that featured a sociocultural understanding of social class foregrounding the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of living as classed subjects under capitalism and embraced their working-class identities. Through the vocabulary of the social class literacy curriculum, analysis of social class in two working-class YA texts, and writing and talking about their classed lives, three working-class students utilized the curriculum to mourn working-class identities previously not discussed in public contexts. Findings from the study reinforce the significance of “mirrors” (Bishop, 1990, ix) in textual selections that feature working-class lives in dignified ways, perhaps as opportunities for working-class students to not only see themselves but also to identify their experiences as valid and to mourn losses of cherished identities.

Based on the notion that one’s critical consciousness development is rooted in understanding how the moments and narratives of our collective past construct our realities, this article brings together theories of critical literacy, critical memory, and critical sociohistorical consciousness to offer a literacy framework that can foster students’ radical imagination. By examining data from an ethnographic study of students’ critical consciousness development in a social justice-oriented urban high school, the author examines how a critical sociohistorical literacy approach to teaching classroom literature presents a site for interrogating and disrupting structures of inequity as well as a pathway for young people to cultivate innovative, literary perspectives in pursuit of social change. The framework and examples offered in this work highlight practical approaches for English educators seeking to support critical consciousness development in classrooms as well as the need for youth to develop critical sociohistorical literacies as a component of social activism and future building.

In this article, we explore how multilingual paraprofessional teachers and students broadened the construction of personhood through literacy instruction in an English-medium school located in a Mid-Southern, semi-rural US town. Drawing upon a study that blended practitioner inquiry with an ethnographic approach, we closely examine how the construction personhood in translanguaging read-alouds was broadened beyond dominant models of personhood—as monolingual and as having Eurocentric, middle-class, and adult-sanctioned knowledges. Our findings show how students and teachers constructed broader models of personhood by constructing a model of a multilingual speaker and reader as well as Latine, working-class, and childhood popular culture knowledges as highly valued and exciting attributes of being human. We conclude by discussing what kinds of interactions these moments could foreshadow and the implications of this work for researchers and teachers to understand how both discursive and contextual factors can contribute to broadening conceptions of personhood to provide children and youth with a greater sense of dignity and belonging in their literacy learning.

With a view to better preparing teachers to engage in linguistically responsive feedback practices, we examined what 120 preservice secondary English language arts teachers (PSETs) considered to be “useful” and “appropriate” feedback to English learner (EL) writers by analyzing posts to an online database of student writing and teacher feedback. Findings of this qualitative study show that PSETs valued linguistic diversity, shared many core orientations of linguistically responsive teaching, and sought to give ELs holistic writing feedback; however, they ultimately equated useful feedback with error correction. PSETs were highly attuned to EL errors, but they were not able to connect different types of errors to language development and could not determine which errors were appropriate to correct given the student’s proficiency level. Furthermore, PSETs largely ignored ELA content and attributed appropriate EL feedback to teacher bilingualism rather than recognizing the need to learn about ELs’ interests and backgrounds. We suggest equipping PSETs with skills to learn about ELs and leveraging extant PSET attention to grammar with additional knowledge of language development processes. Identifying proficiency-level-appropriate errors could allow PSETs to selectively correct errors and provide space for more substantive feedback on ELA content.