Research in the Teaching of English - Current Issue

After 40-plus years, I retired from my professorship and returned to my first role as a teacher of children (kindergarteners through second graders, now at a neighborhood after-school center). As an academic researcher, an ethnographer, I had spent years with children as a “friend” as they often described me. But at the center, I was a teacher, expected to promote the children’s composing. In this role, I experienced at first a sharp shift in my relationship to children. The question arose: What is the relationship between being a researcher and being a teacher? I compared my responses to and from three selected center children and three research project children; data (field notes, written products) for each center child was compared to that of a research project child with similar composing characteristics. All children were urban and African American. Among my findings were that, first, my observations of center children were not the data-filled field notes of project children, and, second, that the teacher me was more attuned to the writing community in formation. Children expected our routine prac-tices, they were eager to share their work, and, moreover, they were ready responders to each other. By the school year’s end, I knew that all who teach must blend the roles of researcher and teacher: We are curious about those we teach; we work to study them the best we can by observing their responses to our efforts, and what we thereby learn feeds into how we teach and how our students learn.

This article draws from a yearlong practitioner inquiry to explore solidarity and inspiration among Black and Latinx youth songwriters in a community-based music program. The inquiry builds upon scholarship and practice around solidarity across Black and Latinx youth through songwriting, performance, and multi-sensory practices. Theoretically, the study brings together a language of solidarity framework and the emergent, future-facing standpoint of the not-yet. Findings address the uneven access to racial knowledge between Black and Latinx, creative enclosures and how inspiration travels within and across these enclosures. Leveraging the not-yet, we discuss implications for embracing unevenness, non-linearity, and enclosures while theorizing a language of solidarity among Black and Latinx youth.

Building on scholarship that recognizes writing as a rich site of identity negotiation, this study introduces a sociolinguistic analytic frame based on Tannen’s multidimensional power/connection grid and multimodal and visual grammars to explore young writers’ identity work. By integrating Tannen’s framework with an identity and positioning lens, we show how children’s self-authoring reflects ongoing negotiations of status and connection, either affirming how they see themselves or challenging how others position them as writers. Using an interpretive case study of two first graders, we argue that writing identity work involves continuously maneuvering and negotiating levels of connection (closeness and distance) and status (hierarchy and equality) through literacy practices. Our findings reveal how these micro-level linguistic and multimodal negotiations unfold multidimensionally and shape identity and positioning, offering insights for educators to better support students’ writing identity development.

This study examined preservice teachers’ (PTs’) multimodal and multigenre writing portfolios advocating for change in the teaching profession. Using theories of humanizing education and Janks’s framework of Big P and little p politics, this study analyzed how PTs used writing as professional resistance and a means to heal their own schooling harms and to envision a more inclusive future for students. The findings elevated how PTs engaged as writers to see teaching as a political engagement and transformative act within the educational climate of control, compliance, and conformity. Implications for the field included possibilities to expand professional agency and supporting future teachers in confronting the political and relational complexities of their work through authorship and sharing their voices and advocacy broadly.