This reflective essay explores the evolution of an educator’s understanding of the inherently political nature of teaching inspired by Paulo Freire’s philosophy and deepened through personal experience and professional development. Initially resistant to integrating politics into pedagogy the author recounts how mentoring new teachers and a pivotal experience with a mentee exposed the inadequacy of apolitical teaching. A Fulbright fellowship further shifted the author’s perspective revealing that classrooms are critical spaces for civic discourse and democratic engagement. Embracing this insight the author began explicitly incorporating political texts and discussions while maintaining a focus on analytical thinking over partisan debate. The essay concludes with a framework for preservice and new teachers to navigate political content thoughtfully and responsibly. It argues that avoiding politics is not a neutral act but rather a missed opportunity to equip students for active citizenship in a complex polarized world.

This article addresses how teacher educators prepare literacy teachers to respond to the politicization of reading and literacy in current contexts. Utilizing a humanizing pedagogies framework the authors explore four nested cases within a case study of one cohort of preservice teachers’ literacy mentoring in a two-semester course-based practicum. They ask how preservice teachers practice humanizing pedagogy and how they reflect toward their future teaching. A qualitative analysis of course artifacts reveals particularities in how participants learn about themselves as they mentor young readers leverage those understandings to build their teaching practice and connect their experiences to the politics of schooling. Participants envision cultivating belonging and critical literacy within their future classrooms conscious of the conditions of schooling and hopeful about their capacity to teach critical literacy. Implications for teacher education include designing spaces to come to know and meet preservice teachers where they are in their journeys toward humanization.

This review of teacher research published in four NCTE journals from 2003–2023 considers who is authoring teacher research articles about which middle and secondary contexts and for which audiences. Despite teacher research’s history in English education epistemic injustice has fragmented its contributions to our field’s knowledge base. Consequently a recent history is critically important to document. Drawing on positioning theory to analyze how article authors position themselves and others through writing for publication this research reveals that most teacher research published in these NCTE journals is authored by English educators. It identifies three vantage points from which English educators differently position themselves in relation to teacher research and teacher-researchers as they contribute to ELA’s emancipatory aims. At a sociopolitical moment when teacher agency and intellectualism are particularly threatened this review calls English educators forward. By capitalizing on our collective power to publish and seek sustainable change with classroom teacher-researchers we champion shared roles as knowledge producers and agents of change working together to emancipate students and one another from oppressive systems of inequities.

Answering recent calls for more scholarship on LGBTQIA+ experiences in the writing center this article reflects upon the joys and emotional labor involved in queering our center’s programming by offering an LGBTQIA+ literature writing group.

In recent years the college writing center at our community college began an embedded tutoring program in hopes of reaching more developmental English students. A combination of the pandemic and the temporary shift to online-only tutoring pandemic funding opportunities and changes in the college’s developmental education program led tutors to rethink how best to help developmental students succeed. Ultimately this article shows that developing our embedded tutoring program facilitated a partnership between instructors tutors and students that resulted in higher academic performance student and faculty engagement and faculty buy-in.

This collaboratively composed paper recognizes the juxtaposition and resonance between two writing center workers’ experiences writerly voices and perspectives on the future of diversity equity and inclusion in the two-year writing center. It also takes into account our shared commitment to honesty with ourselves and each other about where we succeed and where we fail in our work as diversity practitioners.

The editors of this special issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College highlight the lack of scholarship on two-year college writing centers despite their widespread presence. Systemic barriers are in place at most two-year colleges including heavy workloads lack of institutional support for research and limited incentives for two-year-college writing center staff to publish. The issue features new research showcasing the unique challenges and innovations in two-year college writing centers. The editors hope this issue sparks an ongoing conversation around the important and distinctive work happening in two-year college writing centers

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.

This article considers recent trends in developmental education and analyzes disaggregated student data exploring the extent to which developmental education reform of corequisite instruction affected access of one community college’s students to a first-semester composition course. By examining student access and student success across two distinct semesters before and after extensive developmental education reform the article presents an approach to deep assessment that is necessary for English departments at community colleges as they analyze and adjust to specific reforms.

This article shares findings from a research study on writing students’ preferences needs and success rates across in-person hybrid and asynchronous online modalities and the implications for department scheduling.

In this article I provide a chronological narrative to my ungrading choices in composition classes as a neurodiverse single mother from a working-class background. I discuss my positionality as a White person committed to justice and my experiences as an “assessment killjoy” (West-Puckett et al.) during the ethical turn in writing studies. From this foundation I reflect on my attempts to grade more equitably. I discuss my pedagogical goals which are grounded in intersectional feminist theory (hooks; Royster and Kirsch) standpoint theory (Harding) learning sciences (Hammond; Ross) and a robust model of the writing construct (White et al.) and analyze the consequences of exit portfolios labor-based contract grading (Inoue) and specifications grading (Nilson) via this integrated framework.

In this piece the author engages in dialogue with the preceding article “Affecting Social Class Literacy: Classed Emotions in Preservice Teachers’ Lives Literature Analysis and Future Teaching” by Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides to consider the manifestation of political ideologies in teacher education.

This article explores the affordances of roleplaying games (RPGs) in teacher education contexts for supporting navigation across personal cultural and literary interpretive practices. Coding preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) discussions about their own learning experiences we see how tabletop RPGs designed around existing texts have the potential to support both textual comprehension as well as literary interpretation. RPGs made space for circumventing difficult language and Western cultural knowledge instead foregrounding students’ identities textual connections questions and meaning-making. PSTs described the benefits of a “double experience” in which their own decisions in the roleplaying game structured their understanding of the original text when they were reading and their interpretations of it after the activity. We share teacher learning around design including tensions around staying on script to support comprehension or going “off-script” to support critical literary interpretation. We suggest that RPGs in English education contexts can help teachers see the potential of centering joyful sometimes messy interpretive meaning-making while decentering individual texts and teacher-centric pedagogies.

In this piece the author engages in dialogue with the preceding article “Rime of the Emergent Teachers: Supporting Collaborative Literary Learning through Roleplaying Games” by Karis Jones Sasha Karbachinskiy Jennifer Castillo and Alexandra Salom by considering the inherently political nature of roleplaying games.

When we offer students engagement in the creation of the course not only do we acknowledge that those in culturally minoritized positions are adept at deploying the same skills we seek to teach but also we show that their lived experiences are valuable necessary and desirable within the classroom. This recognition opens a space in which students not only feel a sense of belonging but also create the terms of belonging. This article shares an evolving five-year and running process and offers an overview of how a community-based assessment practice grew from adapting (with students) labor-based grading coupled with self-directed writing.

Introducing an alternative grading framework to students can be a challenge. Instructors might encounter student resistance confusion and frustration. To better help students understand both why moving away from traditional grading practices is important and how the classroom’s alternative assessment system functions this Instructional Note suggests centering dialogue students’ histories with grades and an overview of the classroom’s alternative grading practice during the first couple of weeks of class.

This article explores the connections between creating an equitable classroom and antiracist assessment. The article attempts to explain the impact of the equitable classroom on student apathy. Additionally rigid concepts of “failing” under this equitable classroom model are interrogated. Finally the article provides some insights into the limitations and pitfalls of the equitable classroom design.

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.