Using the metaphor of my grandmother’s garden and her endless pockets of tools this praxis-focused discussion offers practical guidance for educators to effectively and strategically navigate complex political contexts and restrictive mandates. The goal is to equip and empower teachers so that they and students might flourish despite figurative briars and rocky terrains just as my grandmother’s plants did.

In this ELATE position statement issued on November 21 2024 the authors contextualize GenAI as an issue of literacy offering specific considerations for incorporating addressing and exploring this technology in ELA teacher education. More broadly the authors encourage us to question how teacher education can navigate these increasingly complex technologies and the attendant literacies while responding to the political implications of both.

This essay explores an in-class activity designed to prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) to leverage critical literacies as they navigate political social media claims about English/reading instruction in a methods of middle school ELA course. PSTs investigated content produced by social media teacher influencers ascribed to the “Science of Reading” (SOR) movement using Gee’s (2014) “tools of inquiry” for discourse analysis. While PSTs shared greater critical perspectives of social media content after the activity they also struggled to identify the political underpinnings of instructional claims. The author reflects on this activity and offers suggestions for teacher educators as they prepare PSTs for twenty-first-century political and pedagogical influences.

The recent ELATE position statement on generative AI in English education is nuanced and wise perhaps the best that can be produced in this historical moment. However we must fully grasp the dangers of the “efficiency” celebrated by the technological economic and ideological interests driving these tools which have consequences for individual cognition and democratic participation. ELA professionals must champion broad human engagements with language including writing that prizes people’s experiences thoughts imaginations and voices for purposes beyond efficiency.

Teacher educators who are committed to antiracist and anti-oppressive work are faced with challenges when confronted with future teachers who do not share these values. This reflective essay explores the story of a new teacher educator committed to social justice work who must work with a teacher candidate who openly contested discussions of institutional racism gender inclusivity and the “liberal” agenda yet was evaluated by the student teaching assessment form as a proficient teacher.

In this piece the author engages in dialogue with the preceding article “A Collision of Beliefs: Teacher Education in the Time of Trump” by Abby Boehm-Turner to reflect on the importance of criticality and liberatory practices.

In the field of English education views of working-class individuals matter not only in terms of teacher beliefs about their students but also for literature instruction that reflects classed lives in texts like A Raisin in the Sun and The Great Gatsby. Without an explicit critical discourse on social class (Jones & Vagle 2013) dominant views of working-class people remain intact especially in the middle-class institution of schooling (Vagle & Jones 2012). This study examines the effects of implementing a social class literacy (SCL) curriculum featuring classed feelings in a young adult literature course designed for English language arts preservice teachers. Findings show preservice teachers capably applying SCL to literary interpretations and to their lives and how doing so affected their ideas about future teaching.

Early in the 2023–2024 school year Mr. Medeiros and a handful of his Kaua’i High School Future Teachers of Hawai’i club members took a two-day huaka’i (trip) to Oahu. This service-learning trip was part of the learning progression for the club which is focused on student advocacy and social justice. With the help of Josh Reppun retired Hawai’i State Supreme Court Justice Mike Wilson the people at What School Could Be and other amazing educators the students began their huaka’i by gathering together to think and talk about the purpose of education/school. Ostensibly they were traveling to Oahu to learn from others but really the adults were there to learn how to keep pushing the boundaries of the idea of “school.”

This study examines how English teachers in a politically conservative state integrate principles of Critical Language Awareness into their existing curricula despite a political climate hostile to teaching about social inequity. This project stemmed from concerns expressed by preservice teachers in an English methods class about their ability to enact the critical language teaching methods they were learning because of the political context in the state. Interviews with practicing teachers reveal how teachers incorporate critical language teaching across English courses as disparate as AVID English 9 Journalism and African American Literature. The study provides examples of external pushback against race-related curriculum and the resulting fear teachers carried in their professional and personal lives. It also documents teachers’ persistence in the face of fear. Finally the study raises challenges of teaching about race and language with white students in politically conservative contexts highlighting a need to support teachers doing critical language teaching in these spaces. The findings demonstrate that even under the scrutiny of anti-CRT sentiments teachers can successfully engage critical language awareness.

I take up a practitioner inquiry stance to examine a wobble I experienced while conducting research with ELA preservice teachers. Drawing on Garcia and O’Donnell-Allen’s Pose Wobble Flow framework (2015) I consider how my research design and pose as a justice-oriented teacher educator led me to wobble when participants agreed on a potentially problematic idea. Resisting and interrogating binaries of right/wrong and good/bad I speculatively (re)imagine the possibilities of my interactions with the ELA PSTs. Sharing these speculative (re)imaginings of wobbles in teacher education can function to deepen and make more flexible our individual poses and make visible just collective educational futures.

This qualitative case study examines preservice teachers’ (PTs) self-selected writer’s notebook (WNB) entries and written reflections in two literacy methods courses. The authors use thematic analysis to consider how the writer’s notebooks supported PTs’ learning to teach multilingual writers while concurrently writing for themselves and navigating contemporary sociopolitical contexts. The authors describe how PTs used their writer’s notebooks to process emotion and identity develop professional stances and build experiential knowledge around multilingual multimodal writer praxis. The authors conclude with suggestions for teacher educators and researchers to expand these practices.

As I write this editorial almost a year has passed since the 2023 ELATE Summer Conference in Atlanta. Yet the connecting presenting socializing and theorizing that occurred at the conference continue to generate important research and practices for the field of English language arts teacher education. This second special issue on the conference theme of “Centering Hope and Organizing for Justice” expands on this theme in exciting ways sharing research that will move education closer to justice. Yet before I highlight the justice-centered work contained in this issue I first want to reflect on the elements of hope and justice from the conference theme and how they are operating in my life scholarship and activism considering these questions: What is giving me hope right now? And how does hope help me organize for justice? I invite you dear reader to consider these questions alongside me.

The work of three secondary English teachers illustrates the power and risks of centering talk as a practice in writing classrooms.