English Language Arts/ Higher Ed
In Dialogue: The Depth of Political Influences in Education
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: A Collision of Beliefs: Teacher Education in the Time of Trump
Teacher educators who are committed to antiracist and anti-oppressive work are faced with challenges when confronted with future teachers who do not share these values. This reflective essay explores the story of a new teacher educator committed to social justice work who must work with a teacher candidate who openly contested discussions of institutional racism gender inclusivity and the “liberal” agenda yet was evaluated by the student teaching assessment form as a proficient teacher.
Research: Rime of the Emergent Teachers: Supporting Collaborative Literary Learning through Roleplaying Games
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 Dialogue: Parallels of Discrimination: Affirming Palestinian American Adolescents’ Identity in Politically Charged Climates
In this piece the author engages in dialogue with the preceding article “A Collision of Beliefs: Teacher Education in the Time of Trump” by Abby Boehm-Turner to reflect on the importance of criticality and liberatory practices.
In Dialogue: Threads between Teaching, Politics, and Tabletop Gaming
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.
Research: Affecting Social Class Literacy: Classed Emotions in Preservice Teachers’ Lives, Literature Analysis, and Future Teaching
In the field of English education views of working-class individuals matter not only in terms of teacher beliefs about their students but also for literature instruction that reflects classed lives in texts like A Raisin in the Sun and The Great Gatsby. Without an explicit critical discourse on social class (Jones & Vagle 2013) dominant views of working-class people remain intact especially in the middle-class institution of schooling (Vagle & Jones 2012). This study examines the effects of implementing a social class literacy (SCL) curriculum featuring classed feelings in a young adult literature course designed for English language arts preservice teachers. Findings show preservice teachers capably applying SCL to literary interpretations and to their lives and how doing so affected their ideas about future teaching.