To demonstrate the value of access and attending to audiences’ experiences this article shares our analysis of our interviews with eleven students who created videos with sound and captions. We build on our analysis to present a modified set of criteria for assessing how video composers demonstrate awareness of their audiences’ needs and preferences when designing access.

Drawing from a qualitative study we share findings that demonstrate how students articulate and express emotion in reflection. As they reflect on their writing identities processes and products peer and instructor feedback and assess their work the students in our study routinely discuss their emotions. Our essay closes with pedagogical strategies for helping students reflect on their thinking and feeling about writing.

In this article we reflect on the potential of involving preservice teachers in pedagogical experiences with community-based organizations to cultivate all students’ genius and criticality (Muhammad 2020). Drawing on our (re)active praxis as teacher educators we examine our work with two preservice ELA teachers who planned and taught a critical literacy curriculum at a community-based site. By (re)imagining teacher education beyond traditional university and school classroom walls we consider the possibilities of bridging university-community contexts to develop our own implementation of critical pedagogies.

A politics of design framework guided the development of an instructional plan for studying a middle-grade novel that examines themes of belonging and identity.

Teachers in the Red Mountain Writing Project developed instructional strategies to meet local challenges their students face.

Two educators in Australia studied a classroom in which the teacher and students applied a critical lens to digital texts.

A grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered educators and artists in Georgia an opportunity to test the influence of social media as a rhetorical tool for discussion.

In this article I consider how pre- and inservice educators notice texts they enjoy in their daily lived experiences and how this positioning may support an attention to equity-oriented English education. I focus on texts that educators working in professional roles ranging from literacy coaches to elementary and secondary ELA teachers to administrators notice in their daily experiences. Drawing on a curricular assignment in a writing pedagogy course I consider how educators relate the texts they find interesting to their own understanding of equity-oriented writing instruction. I examine for how teachers consider the texts of their lives and how such attentiveness might help them build humanizing equity-oriented curriculum with and for students. I also seek to disrupt the overwhelming emphasis on writing as what is needed to pass a standardized assessment. This alignment toward enjoyment may support English educators as they in turn support and view students and their languages and literacies as worthy and brilliant.

These remarks have been edited lightly for publication here.

This essay defines “benevolent gaslighting”: a technology of whiteness in which racisms are repurposed as benevolent misunderstandings. In reading disciplinary trends and cultural examples we show how it (re)centers whiteness and prompts BIPOC to question their histories memories and realities by situating racial trauma as “progressive” teaching moments.

Although a good deal of writing has been done about reading many articles both in professional journals and in public media bemoan a lack of reading skills. There is often a discourse around what students can’t do. In this article we argue that adapting an assetbased experiential framework around reading could be one of the most foundational and crucial steps in transforming our structures to respect and therefore retain and engage returning students.

This article explores the Reading Apprenticeship framework as a support for instructors to orchestrate dynamic contextualized literacy instruction that supports both student engagement and deeper learning about the discipline of writing studies.

This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes interviews and student writing this study asks (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking (Mignolo 2012) and politicized funds of knowledge (Gallo & Link 2015) positioned themselves as change agents and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.

Literacy learning is an ideological proposition one that privileges certain forms of language and those who speak them above others. This qualitative study utilizes critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black 2004) to examine the literacy ideologies at work in a secondary remedial reading class. By analyzing the speech of Mr. Baker a seasoned remedial reading teacher and his ninth-grade student Angelica three dominant metaphors in the corpus are explored: READING CLASS IS A RACE LEARNING TO READ is a journey and STUDENTS ARE MACHINES. Findings suggest both the limitations of the metaphors employed by participants as well as the utility of critical metaphor analysis in uncovering the ideological underpinnings of school-based literacy practices.

The policing of Black Language is inextricably tied to the policing of Black people and is entrenched in a long history of white Western European colonization. The legacies of white supremacy pervade schooling in its earliest years yet Black teachers have consistently mounted a counterforce in battling white hegemony. In this article I feature one such teacher Raniya who licensed Black Language in her preK classroom. Based on three months of classroom observations and interviews this ethnographic case study explores the institutional architecture that affords white supremacist language assessments particularly through an epistemology of language as an abstracted entity and through its process of curricularization. A raciolinguistic perspective illuminated how the white teachers at Raniya’s school insisted on broadly dehumanizing students of color through a schoolwide policy based on white monolingual standards. Drawing on Kynard’s (2013) notion of “vernacular insurrections” I juxtapose white teachers’ raciolinguistic ideologies with Raniya’s practices. She claimed her classroom as a critical vernacular site through her approach of student language as a practice and by subverting the normalcy of white hegemony within the schoolwide assessment process. This article calls for a shift in thinking about skills-based decontextualized approaches as inherently white supremacist and excavates how such a language approach supports white supremacy to thrive. I discuss the significance of centering the fight against white supremacy in our analysis of literary practices which elucidates the potency of even small amounts of white dominance in institutional mechanisms as detrimental for Black students. As a field the stagnation of Black student equity and commitment to white hegemony by white educators and administrators across preK through higher education persists. Though some white educators diverge from hegemonic practices we must consider who benefits and what is sustained when exceptions are used to overlook and not interrogate the norm. This work contributes to the mounting rationales for racial diversification in the teacher workforce.

A teacher explores the concept of literary ghosts with his students as they work through grief and practice autobiographical writing

A student teacher refects on the study of activist poetry with ninth-grade honors students.

Leaders of the Oklahoma State University Writing Project share an immersive inquiry project in which students applied their research on the 2021 Tulsa Race Massacre to present-day injustices.

Glenn Rhoades delves into a memoir of the historical and personal stories of a contemporary gay teacher.

Students experience visualization entering into fictional storyworlds about the nature of monstrosity.