We are now a decade into the call for comprehensive community college “redesign” known as Guided Pathways. This introduction provides an overview of the Guided Pathways model and its advocacy arm and reviews critiques of the model in education research and two-year college literacy studies. These reviews contextualize the contents of the special issue.

Three educators discuss using social annotation with high school students describing how students engaged meaningfully with the text by asking questions and speculating about characters and plot.

Service-learning pedagogy complements language arts learning outcomes while allowing students and teachers to find and provide hope and justice in bleak situations.

In each of the five 2022 recommended honor books the protagonist seeks to weave themselves into the tapestry of their family histories in order to emerge with an understanding of their future both as an individual and as a member of a collective.

This article examines the purpose of testimonio as a written genre and the ways in which personal identity-driven writing instruction can be valuable in a secondary English language arts classroom.

A veteran English teacher gives advice to her younger self.

This article offers a unique approach to teaching critical media literacy by examining the rhetorical influence of conspiracy theories as a tool to counter mis- and disinformation.

This article details a student-led publishing project that chronicled individuals’ stories in a final authentic product and provides advice for implementing such projects in secondary classrooms.

Jacey de la Torre explores strategies for creating humanizing classrooms that welcome students’ assets and mobilize their ability to tap their localized knowledge as a rich meaning-making resource.

The authors reflect on their own past classroom text selections and practices to illustrate their unintentional complicity in upholding whiteness within their classrooms.

In this inaugural column Jeanne Dyches acknowledges the current sociopolitical climate extols “staying angry” as a powerful form of agency and invites English language arts stakeholders to create community as a form of resistance.

Researchers have advocated for the use of games for learning yet few studies focus on games within English teacher education. Even fewer studies examine English Language Arts (ELA) teachers as designers of games. In this article the authors examine a new ELA teacher’s design and implementation of a tabletop card game and explore what this game and its use in a middle school classroom illustrate about the purposes of games in secondary ELA. Data collection occurred across one year and included three semi-structured interviews and game materials. Key findings focus on games as (a) platforms for learning empathy as a literacy practice; (b) texts for story building and interpretive practice; and (c) ways to reimagine classroom learning. We discuss implications for teacher educators and teachers including games in ELA curriculum the use of games to reconceptualize schooling and tensions that can arise when teachers incorporate games in classrooms.

In this essay three English educators who attended the National Technology Leadership Summit reflect on the benefits of using GenAI in English education while simultaneously considering the perils of its use. After posing many critical questions for consideration they conclude with a call for teacher educators to develop a robust research agenda focused on GenAI in partnership with preservice teachers and students as well as a push to engage in policy advocacy that can inform local and state policies.

With the goal of restoring hope and joy in our classroom communities the author focuses on relishing moments of excellence in the face of trauma by following specific strategies for maintaining positive feelings.

A high school teacher reconsiders the common reading strategy of making connections and explores critical literacy practices that cultivate an environment supportive of disconnections.

In a call for a reimagining of English language arts classrooms that center Black and Brown students two former teachers offer three anti-racist teaching practices that decenter whiteness and foster hope and justice.

A veteran teacher and her intern explore how writing can uniquely benefit students during difficult times.

Toliver shares her experiences as a student and teacher to discuss why centering Black youth futures is important in English language arts classrooms.

A Latina teacherresearcher advocates for cultivating spaces of acompañamiento by centering student voices stories and knowledge through book clubs and young adult literature.

This article based on an interview study with community changemakers working within hostile systems of higher education and legislative politics builds upon scholarship that names and challenges normative time by offering a cultural rhetorics analysis of activists’ alternative community-based temporal practices that are centered in relationships and prioritize participant needs over institutional mandates. We theorize community-based temporal practices based on the changemaking stories of our interview participants especially moments when they encountered time-based obstacles and used community-based knowledges as workarounds. We constellate these stories about the material barriers of time the way time is wielded by those in power and how to prioritize relationships thus illuminating temporal practices that can be used to challenge institutional systems.

This essay argues for attention in cultural rhetorics scholarship to stories as effective civic pedagogical tools informed by participatory knowledge-making practices. Drawing on a multiyear “mobile cinema democracy project” based on the physical circulation across Africa Europe and North America of a successful African democratic story told in the multi-award-winning documentary An African Election I attend to both the documentary and its larger contextual project “A Political Safari: An African Adventure in Democracy Building.” I demonstrate the ways that the African storytelling traditions of collaboration upon which this project rests offer us cultural rhetoricians key opportunities to reimagine inclusive knowledgemaking practices in using stories as civic pedagogies. My analysis reveals how such knowledge-making practices might orient our work against the grain of hierarchical exclusionary colonial practices and toward decolonial approaches that are truly participatory and inclusive.

In their report of the violences committed during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) the Commission for Historical Clarification stated that “historical memory both individual and collective” is important for creating just conditions and providing reparations to the victims of violence perpetrated during this armed conflict (1998 48). As a result remembrance projects began to create a memoria histórica that historicizes the violences committed by the Guatemalan government. These remembrance projects and memories often imagine a heteronormative Guatemalan populace and in turn erase the existence of queer and trans Maya people also affected by violence and ongoing genocide.

In this article I argue that the practice of Maya backstrap weaving is a rhetorical mechanism for remembrance and maintenance of traditional practices. Using a Two Spirit critique I articulate a Maya-centered queer/trans rhetorical methodology that points to how Western historiographic methodologies continue to be the norm in Guatemalan historicizing practices but also within WGSS queer and trans studies and rhetoric and writing studies. My use of backstrap weaving is a type of storytelling and remembrance practice that centers cultural rhetorics Indigenous sovereignty and locally specific Indigenous paradigms and frameworks to stop the erasure of Indigenous peoples from collective consciousness and canons.

Drawing upon original post-structural phenomenological research this article explores how Jewish discourses are pathologized and marginalized in rhet/comp spaces in ways that impact theorizing pedagogy professional interaction and disciplinary knowledge production and how the academy’s white Christian hegemony reifies itself through these processes. As the limited assimilative success of Jewish people demonstrates inclusion is not inherently equitable nor does it necessarily change the structures of white supremacy. Ultimately I suggest that cultural rhetorics contributes a more critical conceptualization of “inclusion” for the academy that acknowledges the limitations and dangers of assimilation into whiteness.

Drawing on disability studies analysis of institutional narratives of disability by composition and rhetoric scholars this article theorizes “favor access.” Favor access gestures toward inclusion but is steeped in the capitalist colonialist logic of academic institutions in service of ultimately extractive dehumanizing agendas. Instead of favor access the article points to collective access as articulated by disability justice activists. As opposed to favor access collective access rejects institutional logics and values community and collaboration rather than academia’s emphasis on individualism and competition. This article considers sites where collective access is happening in composition classrooms and in the field of composition and rhetoric.

In “Our Story Begins Here” (2014) the CR Theory Lab offers key concepts related to cultural rhetorics such as constellating and relationality. Drawing from decolonial theory and practice these concepts allow cultural rhetoricians to develop a scholarly practice that is reflective of the cultural community they are a part of and write for and to address the long histories and cultural practices of the land they dwell on. Where the CR Theory Lab is committed to a decolonial practice invested in the theories and lived experiences of the tribal nations people of Turtle Island they also offer that it isn’t the only approach to cultural rhetorics. I argue that both scenarios reflect a larger political and cultural issue regarding how the occupied territories of Turtle Island (also known as the United States) don’t know what to do with tribal nations people our fight for sovereignty or our ongoing effort for cultural continuance. In other words I will make an argument that maps how our discipline’s approach to decolonial theory cultural rhetorics and Indigenous rhetorics reflects the ongoing efforts of survivance and resurgence of Indigenous people.

Composed in a series of letters this essay explores the interdependent knowledge and survival work of crip communities. The authors discuss their experiences of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME or ME/CFS) in a practice of Akemi Nishida’s “bed activism” which challenges ableist demands for productivity from spaces of rest and care. Hsu and Nish ask what we lose—in intellectual and cultural growth and in actual lives—when academic spaces continue to devalue physical and cognitive difference. The resulting conversation considers illness as both an inevitability of lived experience and something exacerbated and ignored by academic spaces. It then explores how crip communities expand definitions of knowledge and knowledgemaking—offering wisdom that is not only valuable for a more inclusive profession but also necessary for a world increasingly sickened by extractive economies.

This critical phenomenological study sought Native American student perspectives on intention and desired faculty response following self-disclosure of personal challenges in college writing assignments and discusses implications for faculty and for implementing trauma-informed writing pedagogy with students who are historically marginalized.

This is a lightly edited version of the TYCA Chair’s Address delivered at the 2023 National TYCA Conference in Chicago Illinois.

In this article we share strategies and data from a study constructed in a faculty learning community using course analytics to design deliver and track instructor-student communication—in the form of “nudges”—to improve student success. Although we do not feel comfortable making generalized conclusions from such a small sample we think our data suggests that many students positively benefited from grade-based nudging. We also think it was extremely important that our nudging interventions focused on all students within the class not only those who were not doing well. However we acknowledge that the majority of the instructors said this type of work takes time.

This is a lightly edited version of the Conference Chair’s Address delivered at the 2023 TYCA National Conference held on February 15 in Chicago Illinois.

Informed by AsianCrit sociocultural literacy studies and solidarity scholarship this article examines how an Indian American woman scholar-practitioner and eight Indonesian American girls collectively engaged with civic learning in an out-of-school critical English education space. The researcher offers the construct of solidarity-as-project by tracing examples of how the facilitator and participants crossed boundaries of identity and experience to interdependently learn about and centralize Asian American civic legacies. The researcher also considers the complications of power and diversity in those co-learning processes. The article concludes with recommendations for how English teacher education can orient teacher candidates toward enacting solidarity-as-project alongside Asian American girls and young women.