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English Language Arts/ Higher Ed
Research: “The students are only getting more diverse”: Cultivating Culturally Infused Teaching and Learning with Preservice Teachers in a Professional Learning Community
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) have potential as a collaborative model at facilitating culturally relevant/sustainable (CRS) pedagogical practices with preservice teachers. This article presents the results of a study examining the experiences of preservice English educators in a model PLC aimed at fostering understandings of CRS pedagogies with preservice educators. Monthly virtual PLC sessions were conducted over the course of four months focused on developing an understanding of CRS pedagogies with six preservice educators. Transcripts from PLC sessions and individual interviews were examined through a qualitative case-study analysis to determine themes that emerged from participant experiences. Analysis revealed three themes as central to preservice teachers’ experiences in the model PLC: (1) need for sense of community in the PLC (2) apprehension regarding perceived administrative response and (3) enthusiasm for attempting CRS practices in the classroom. PLCs centered on developing CRS practices with preservice educators may aid English teacher education programs in preparing teachers to educate students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
Research: English Teachers’ Experience of Critical Language Teaching in an Anti-CRT Context
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.
Invited Reflection: Small Talk about Big Ideas: The Benefits of ELATE Membership
In this piece three leaders of English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) reflect on their individual experiences with ELATE before collectively exploring the benefits of membership in the professional organization.
Feature: The Role of Reading Instruction in Teaching for Social Justice
College reading instruction warrants recognition as a necessary and actionable means of teaching for social justice. Faculty who teach students how to read course texts—and who guide and support them in doing so—advance social justice and equity via three separate mechanisms of action. These processes preferentially benefit marginalized and underserved students while more broadly fostering conceptual and perspective-taking skills essential for social justice.
Instructional Note: North Central Texas College’s First-Year Composition Textbook Project
In the fall of 2018 the First-Year Composition program at North Central Texas College (NCTC) initiated what informally became known as the Textbook Project. Our goal was to provide our community college students with innovative imaginative and inspiring classroom experiences that paralleled the high-impact opportunities their peers were afforded at four-year universities. The Textbook Project encompassed five key features: an NCTC-specific textbook a campus-wide common read resources for faculty and students in our college’s LMS a college-wide lecture series and funding for faculty professional development. Five years later the project’s emphasis on continuity through collaboration has revitalized the department through faculty engagement and increased student success.
Author-Title Index: Volume Fifty-One
Feature: The Misalignment between the Discipline and the Teaching of Writing
The majority of first-year writing “is taught by teachers whose educational backgrounds are more likely to be in literature cultural studies or creative writing than in rhetoric and composition” (Abraham 78). This disciplinary knowledge gap poses a challenge for FYW faculty to adjust to new shifts in FYW pedagogy. We would expect inhouse faculty development opportunities to help fill these gaps; however the results of our year-long qualitative study indicate that the lack of shared disciplinary knowledge and the constraints on adjunct faculty make it challenging for faculty without backgrounds in writing studies to adapt their pedagogies. We add to the body of scholarship on professionalization in two-year college writing studies (e.g. Andelora; Griffiths; Jensen et al.; Sullivan; Toth et al. “Distinct”) and argue that addressing this problem will require investing resources in adjunct support; changing hiring practices to prioritize expertise in writing studies; and designing faculty development that focuses on both theory and pedagogy.
Announcements
Instructional Note: Working the Whirlwind: SmartArt and Reflection as Introduction to Rhetorical Analysis Research Essays
This Instructional Note is designed to assist students with using the rhetorical skills they already have as a bridge to writing rhetorical analysis essays.
Instructional Note: Write from the Heart (Escribe desde el corazón): Connect Lived Experiences to First-Year Writing Curriculum
This Instructional Note grounded in Latin American cultural values offers “wise practices” for instructors to connect lived experiences to course curriculum encourage authentic voice and “home language practices” and treat students as extended family to reduce academic isolation.
Review: Transformations: Change Work across Writing Programs, Pedagogies, and Practices
Editor’s Introduction: Literacy Studies Really Ties the Room Together, Man: Holding on to Threads in Surreal Times
(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.
Experience to Analysis: Activating the Personal to foster Literary Analysis
Meaningful connections to literature do not have to come at the expense of rigorous literary analysis skills; both are vital to student engagement and learning.
ChatGPT: The Co-teacher We need?
This article explores artificial intelligence and its academic uses and challenges when incorporated into a high school writing curriculum.
High School Matters: The Abolitionist Journey: Paths to Freedom for Black and Brown Students in the ELA Classroom
The authors provide a brief overview of a continuum of abolitionist work to help readers understand the journey toward educational freedom for Black and Brown students including information about how the continuum can be used in the English classroom.
Columns: Reimagining Research: Redesigning Research: Iterations of Youth Participatory Action Research in School
An educator considers the value of an iterative design process for enacting and sustaining a youth participatory action research program in a public high school.
More Than Surviving: Secondary Trauma in English Language Arts
Using methods of storytelling to share and make sense of their experience with trauma in English language arts classrooms the authors imagine healthier ways of coming into relationship with the traumatic conditions produced in schools.
Columns: Critical Approaches to Literature: January 6 and Julius Caesar: Engaging Sociopolitical Events through Dialogic Teaching
In this essay the author discusses how Julius Caesar can inspire dialogue around controversial challenging topics such as the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
“What Would Other Swifties Think?”: Multimodal Composing with Communities in Mind
The authors describe an English language arts teacher’s approach to incorporating a design analysis framework to support multimodal composition for discourse communities.
We Teach English in Times of Perpetual Crisis: The Long (and Tedious) History of Reading Crisis
Secondary English language arts teachers need to reclaim the complex and true stories of literacy as a resistance to the “science of reading” movement and new reading legislation across the US.
Instructional Note: Creating Digital Research Posters in First-Year Writing Classes
This Instructional Note provides information on having students create research posters to support oral presentations in their first-year writing classes. Creating digital posters connects to multimodal assignments and provides transferable skills.
Instructional Note: The Argument-as-Story Exercise: Using Narrative to Foster Confidence and Autonomy in First-Year Writing
Modifying inclusive creative workshop models for FYW classrooms empowers student engagement and persistence and allows instructors with creative practices to effectively draw on their expertise to guide students’ writing of persuasive argumentative prose.
Effects of Self-Regulated Strategy Instruction in an Accelerated Developmental English Course: A Quasi-experimental Study
This study examines the effects of a curriculum based on self-regulated strategy instruction in an accelerated developmental education (DE) English course in a community college. Faculty at the college had established a four-week two-credit compressed course that enabled students to enroll in an eleven-week first-year composition (FYC) course in the same semester reducing remediation from fifteen weeks to just four weeks. The course focused on writing argumentative essays using sources. The study used a quasi-experimental design with five instructors and sixty-six students to compare the experimental curriculum to a business-as-usual control condition. In the experimental curriculum students learned strategies for writing using sources including strategies for critical reading and for planning and revising. In addition to writing and reading strategies students also learned metacognitive self-regulation strategies such as goal setting task management and reflection. The study found a large positive effect (ES = .96) of the treatment on quality of an argument essay written using sources. However no significant effects were found on a summary outline self-efficacy or completion of the subsequent FYC course. The study demonstrates the value of strategy instruction in DE English courses; it is the first experimental study of strategy instruction in an accelerated DE course. Further research is needed to evaluate the effects of strategy instruction in corequisite courses and in FYC.
“It Kind of Helped Me but Also Kind of Didn’t”: Reflections on FYC Five Years Later
This essay seeks to add to existing conversations about the role of first-year composition (FYC) in relation to students’ subsequent literacy experiences. Using data from an open-ended survey of former students five years after they completed FYC in which they describe their current reading and writing practices and reflect on how these practices connect (or fail to connect) to what they recall from FYC this article positions the findings within the context of scholarship on WAW and TFT and ultimately calls for increased attention to the situated nature of writing as part of the FYC curriculum at two-year colleges.
Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty Conference on College Composition and Communication
Editor’s Introduction: We’ve Been Trying to Reach You about Your Profession’s Extended Warranty: Spamming for Visibility and Relevance in English Studies
Reviews: Desegregation State: College Writing Programs after the Civil Rights Movement
Reviews: Drawing Conclusions: Using Visual Thinking to Understand Complex Concepts in the Classroom
Announcements
Instructional Note: How to Create and Communicate Weekly Check-Ins to Promote Community and Belonging
This Instructional Note elaborates on how weekly anonymous wellness check-in surveys can be designed and implemented in English courses to support students’ purposeful awareness of their well-being and to create a sense of supportive community in the composition classroom.
Columns: Teaching and Composing Today: The Power of Listening: Honoring Our Indigenous Writers in the Classroom
While conducting a writing conference with her niece for a university assignment Monique Warena discovered the most important tool for empowering young Indigenous writers is to listen.
Speaking My Mind: Navigating Controversy in Education through Community
This article explores Arts in Action a project that drew criticism and became a subject of controversy due to allegations of violations of state laws related to teaching certain concepts (such as critical race theory) and indoctrinating students.
“I Balance It Dangerously”: How Educators Resist Censorship through the Project LIT Community
Educators across the United States have found ways to resist censorship and attacks on diverse texts through an affinity space called Project LIT.
Columns: Black Youth Futures: “This Might Not Be So Bad”: Building Trust and Community with Black Girl Writers
An educator reflects on her experiences with a girls’ writing group and how she created with its members a powerful space of shared ownership.
Cosmic Perspectives: Scalar Projects and Worldmaking Literacies
A teacher explores the concepts of scale and perspective with his students as they consider what it means to share the planet with others while imagining more hopeful and just worlds.
Columns: Teaching Multilingual Learners: “It Is Only the Language Problem”: Increasing Multilingual Learners’ Motivation to Write through Collaborative Writing
Two teachers reflect on leveraging learners’ agency authentic writing tasks and responsive teaching to better promote their multilingual students’ writing motivation in collaborative writing activities.
Why Triptych? Promoting Student Engagement with Counternarratives via Genre Blending
A new subtype of multigenre paper helps students in both dominant and nondominant groups to connect with counternarratives.
Columns: Telescopes: Possibilities in Yal: “Liberating Futures” through the Eyes of Diverse YAL Authors
The column editor describes how this column will highlight diverse young adult literature authors in future issues.
Columns: Critical Curations: Curating Critical Friendship
This critical curation examines representations of critical friendship across a variety of texts and media.
Invitations to Create: A Fugitive Practice of Antiracist Pedagogy
This article explores antiracist pedagogy within the secondary English language arts classroom through a literary response technique called Invitations to Create.
Resisting the Chilling Effect of Censorship and Scripted Curriculum
This article details how English language arts teaching and a schooluniversity collaboration were censored by two different policies simultaneously: the adoption of scripted curriculum and restriction around teaching about racism.
Examining Our Roles of Literacy Sponsorship for Students’ Equitable Book Access
The authors examine various teacher literacy sponsorship roles that influence students’ reading choices habits and literacy practices in an English language arts classroom.
Book Banning in US Schools and Prisons as Modern-Day Slave Codes
The author examines the relationship between the legacy of slavery and book banning in American schools and prisons arguing that book banning is a modern form of antiliteracy laws known as “slave codes” that were enacted during enslavement.
“Lots of Ways to Be Brave”: A Teacher’s Guide to Facing Censorship
Members of NCTE’s Standing Committee against Censorship offer an overview of the landscape of censorship; the ways teachers can prepare respond and report censorship; and NCTE resources that support teachers.
Research: “They’re just not mature enough sometimes”: Teacher Candidates’ Languaging of Students and Criticality
Working in an English education teacher preparation program that emphasizes Muhammad’s (2020 2023) culturally and historically responsive literacy model three graduate teaching assistants sought to understand how teacher candidates (TCs) in the program take up the learning pursuit of criticality in their planning and teaching. In this article the authors discuss findings and implications from a qualitative study examining how four TCs languaged their understandings and enactments of criticality. Findings show that TCs’ definitions of criticality shaped their practice sometimes limiting it based on the compatibility of TCs’ curriculum or priorities with their understandings of criticality. In addition TCs’ deficit-framing of their students was a factor in how TCs explained the ways they did or did not take up criticality in their teaching. Implications from the study suggest a need to attend to the ways TCs language their students and conceive of criticality to support uptake of criticality in TCs’ planning and instructional practices.
(Re)Active Praxis: “I would get canceled for speaking like this”: Balancing Justice, Compassion, and Freedom in the Antiracist English Methods Classroom
In this essay the author reflects on a preservice teacher who disagreed with the antiracist focus of a methods class but refused to express her views in front of her peers suggesting that teacher educators may need to think harder about how to open spaces for divergent viewpoints on the worldview underlying antiracist pedagogy.
Symposium: Collective Dream for English Education
In this multiauthored piece ELATE members dream about what could be in ELA teacher education offering particular ideas resources theories and activities that could help them realize their dreams.
(Re)Active Praxis: Preparing Preservice Teachers for the Unknown with NCTE Resources
In this article the author shares a research assignment used with English language arts preservice teachers in a methods course to prepare them to engage with the NCTE professional community. The author shares how preservice teachers self-selected research topics designed classroom-ready teacher materials based on their research using NCTE journals and shared this research using panel presentations in class.
Symposium: Students Guiding Pathways
In this symposium seven community college transfer students present their perspectives on Guided Pathways curricular reforms. Drawing on published scholarship and policy documents as well as their own lived experiences they identify positive aspects of the Guided Pathways model as well as shortcomings in its conceptualization and local implementation.
Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: How Guided Pathways Has Promoted Workforce Training and Devalued the Humanities
In minimizing and narrowing students’ opportunities for exploration discovery deliberation and thoughtfulness—the educational gold standard of our nation’s most elite educational institutions—by offering them a rationed education that is designed to facilitate quick completion of a degree or certificate “redesigning” and Guided Pathways reforms and recommendations have promoted “workforce training” and devalued the humanities.