English Language Arts/ Administration
(Re)Active Praxis: Cutting through the Briars: Politics and Context in Teacher Education
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.
Research: “Our students’ identities ought to be at the center of our work”: Examining the Tensions of Enacting Critical Perspectives in Preservice Literacy Teaching
This qualitative study examined elementary education preservice teachers’ (PTs’) enactments of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies within their respective field placements. Data collection occurred across three semesters including participant interviews field observations and teaching artifacts. Analysis indicates that the PTs’ field placement context(s) shaped the affordances and limitations each preservice teacher encountered during student teaching. This study suggests that PTs need support from multiple stakeholders to adopt and enact culturally sustaining pedagogies and it raises questions about what more teacher education programs can do to support PTs once they enter student teaching.
ELATE Position Statement: Exploring, Incorporating, and Questioning Generative Artificial Intelligence in English Teacher Education
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: Preservice Teachers, Critical Literacy, and the Age of the #ScienceofReading
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.
Research: Building Elementary Teacher Candidates’ Comfort and Knowledge for Selecting Children’s Literature Depicting Disabilities
Experiences with children’s literature can serve as bibliotherapy by building readers’ empathy understanding and comfort with disabled characters. However elementary generalist teacher candidates rarely experience this learning in teacher education coursework focused on pedagogy. This exploratory formative design/development study found that teacher candidates’ self-reported comfort choosing children’s literature depicting disability significantly increased following reading and meeting an author of literature depicting disability. Specifically despite concerns about navigating texts with outdated or offensive terminology teacher candidates felt that their students could connect with these characters. Implications for teacher education are discussed.
In Dialogue: People Writing, Human Identities
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.