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English Language Arts/ Administration
(Re)Active Praxis: What If? Wobbling in the Speculative
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: Uncertainty and Vulnerability: Collaborative Course Redesign to Integrate Disciplinary Concepts and Justice Orientations in Contentious Contexts
This (Re)Active Praxis essay centers on the collaborative revision of two English language arts teacher education courses—one on literature and drama and the other on writing and language—in a state experiencing aggressive legislation against practices of diversity equity and inclusion that impacts teacher education preparing students to design justice-oriented education. Two objectives framed this collaborative course revision: to deliver critical teacher preparation grounded in cultural relevance and justice orientations and to design courses that integrate and demonstrate conceptual and instructional relationships between reading and writing. The authors share and reflect on their experiences and process of collaboratively revising the courses offering a heuristic derived from their decision-making to increase or improve ways education courses support preservice teachers’ opportunities to learn and teach literacy in culturally responsive justice-oriented classrooms.
Research: “It feels like a safe place”: A (Re)Invitation to the Writer’s Notebook as Humanizing Pedagogy in Preservice Literacy Teacher Education
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.
Research: “I’ve always had the abolitionist spirit in me”: Preservice Teachers of Color and Pedagogies of Abolitionist Praxis
This year-long ethnographic study explores how two ELA preservice teachers of color enacted pedagogies of abolitionist praxis—centering teaching and learning to and through an abolitionist praxis of identifying and dismantling surveillance criminalization and punishment—via the areas of curriculum and instruction relational work and organizing and activism. When enacting pedagogies of abolitionist praxis with specific attention to curriculum and instruction three findings were identified. First both teachers purposely and strategically designed their curriculum and instruction to explicitly teach an abolitionist praxis yet they did so via distinct approaches. Next the teachers rooted their curriculum and instruction in a radical Black Indigenous and feminist imaginary to teach about but more importantly teach against carceral practices policies and ideologies. Last both teachers facilitated youth-led action research projects that centered present and future world-building actions. This study provides implications for the education and support of preservice teachers and for K–12 teacher practice.
Editorial: Letting Students Lead the Way to Justice
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.
Lifting up Talk as a Crucial Practice in the Writing Classroom
The work of three secondary English teachers illustrates the power and risks of centering talk as a practice in writing classrooms.
Columns: Teaching in a Time of Censorship: Fostering a Culture of Reading to Reduce Fear and Build Community
This month’s column shares how one teacher reflected on the root causes of the parental scrutiny of her book choices and chose a path of communication and community building.
Who Does English? Learning from Youth and Professional Literarian Communities
Two teacher educators explore how youth and literary professionals engage in the creation of new literary knowledge as a form of social justice.
Columns: Telescopes: Possibilities in Yal: The Hoop Dreamcatcher
Byron Graves discusses using his real life as inspiration for writing and how he hopes to see his debut novel Rez Ball centered in classrooms with adolescents.
Columns: The Future is Now: Conscious Classroom Choices: From TikTok Hot Spots to Mindful Social Connections
What does it mean to offer students a “seat at the table” in our English language arts classrooms now that our seats are back in closer proximity following the COVID emergency? Lisa Alexander reminds us of crucial ways to reflect on conscious classroom choices in relation to technology as we seek to strengthen classroom interactions.
Columns: Intersectional Lgbtqia+ Identities: “See All the Pieces”: Photovoice as a Means to Explore Intersectionality
The author considers how photovoice a visual research methodology might support intersectional classroom discussions of LGBTQIA+ topics.
Speaking My Mind: Rethinking a Correct and Proper English
Teachers can make language more equitable by paying attention to the words they use to describe English.