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English Language Arts/ Research
Research: Games to Promote Empathy as a Literacy Practice: A New Teacher’s Playful Practice
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.
Re(Active) Praxis: Making a Place for Rurality: Toward a More Inclusive Multicultural Teacher Education
This piece recounts how a teacher educator’s experiences as a rural student and teacher at various educational levels have shaped her professional identity. Pairing these experiences with scholarship on rural cultural identity she outlines how ELA teacher educators can honor rural identities cultures and ways of being in their classrooms. The pedagogical moves detailed in this piece offer opportunities for both teacher educators and preservice teachers to consider ways of inviting rural culture into their classroom—to make rural culture part of an inclusive and multicultural way of teaching.
Invited Response: Promise and Perils of GenAI in English Education: Reflections from the National Technology Leadership Summit
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.
Re(Active) Praxis: Navigating NCTE Preparation Standards and Restrictive Legislation in English Education Programs
In the midst of quickly changing education legislation English education teacher educators must consider how to prepare teacher candidates with a full understanding of new restrictive legislation as they design and implement instruction upholding NCTE’s standards for antiracist/antibias instruction while protecting themselves from school-level discipline and/or state-level legal implications. In this essay a teacher educator reflects on these conflicts in relation to her own practice and how she has made curricular changes to engage her students in this work.
Research: Solidarity-as-Project: Charting Democratic Co-inquiries in an Asian American Girl and Woman–Centric English Education Community
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.
Re(Active) Praxis: Sub Way, Teach Fresh: How Five Weeks as a High School English Teacher Sharpened My Life as an English Teacher Educator
In this essay the author reflects on his experience as a short-term substitute teacher in a high school English classroom. He considers the personal and professional tensions that led him there the impact of his time in the classroom and the potential it offered to identify and navigate the teacher educators’ “radical preferences” that might occasionally need sharpening.
NCTE Vice Presidential Address: The Work of ELATE
This is a lightly edited version of the address given by Tonya B. Perry at the ELATE Summer Conference on July 7 2023 at Georgia State University Atlanta.
“We Are More Than That!”: Latina Girls Writing Themselves from Margins to Center
In this article I center the voices and experiences of Yazmin Valeria Guadalupe and Monet four escritoras that participated in Somos Escritoras a creative space for Latina girls (grades 6–12) that invites them to share and perform stories from their lived experiences using art theater and writing as tools for reflection and examination of self and world. For two weeks these escritoras created art and composed personal stories from their lives that addressed the tensions and contradictions at the intersections of age language culture and ethnicity they navigate daily as Latina girls. For my inquiry I explored the following questions: How do Latina/Chicana girls use writing and art to describe their experiences histories and identities? What can we learn from their voices? In their embodied art and writing the girls wrote toward the foundation that their mothers had paved for them through their hopes and dreams sometimes deferred. Rewriting narratives of self the girls drew on creative acts to examine their lives and reclaim their experiences. Theorizing the future the girls construct a world for themselves rooted within the stories and voices of their ancestors and those of the writers poets and storytellers whose writing has carved out a place for us in the world. Their words offer important perspectives into the ways that we design spaces and literacy curriculum that centers their intellectual cultural and gendered ways of knowing and being as important resources for teaching and learning.
Supporting Superdiverse Multilingual International Students: Insights from an Ethnographic Exploration
In this study I draw upon ethnographic methods to explore three multilingual international students’ first-semester linguistic functioning in their college writing classrooms and beyond. Through the lens of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007) I investigate participants’ experiences beyond their shared membership as Chinese international students and unpack within-group variabilities in relation to their language and literacy backgrounds. The findings indicate that multilingual international students’ varying high school experiences are likely to position them at different acculturative stages for overseas studies; it is crucial to understand their superdiversity beyond the traditional paradigms of supporting “ELLs.” The findings illustrate that superdiversity plays an important role in complicating our understandings of multilingualism and multilingual student support in American higher education. I argue that recognizing and understanding superdiversity is important for both multilingual international students and their teachers. All college educators across the disciplines must go beyond simply acknowledging the existence of superdiversity. Instead they must explicitly teach it to combat the zero point of English (Mignolo 2009). This article outlines hands-on pedagogical activities to facilitate new arrivers’ smooth linguistic transition in college and achieve linguistic empowerment by debunking monolinguistic assumptions.
Collaborative Translanguaging and Transmodal Literacies: Learning the Language of Science in a Dual-Language Classroom
Research has shown the benefits of peer interaction to scaffold learning of disciplinary literacies. We extend knowledge in this area to examine peer interaction and the affordances it creates when emergent bilinguals engage with multimodal texts in disciplines to make meaning. Using discourse analysis of the interactions of a small group of third graders carrying out a project in science class we explored how four emergent bilinguals collaborated to design produce and distribute traditional and alternative texts. We found that translanguaging and transmodal collaborative structures support learning processes and comprehension to make sense of and contextualize disciplinary knowledge. A dynamic and recursive translanguaging pattern emerges in which the introduction and contextualization of knowledge happens in Spanish the interaction occurs mainly in English and the creation is in both English and Spanish. We discuss the affordances of these collaborative structures for supporting students in science and promoting Spanish and student bilingualism.
Editors’ Introduction: Seeds of Hope: Reflecting on Five Years of Research in the Teaching of English
In Dialogue: The Future of Critical Studies in Literacy Research
For the final In Dialogue of our editorial term we wanted to invite some luminary voices in literacy studies to think together about the future of critical studies in literacy research. We asked Betina Hsieh Danielle Filipiak Tiffany Nyachae David Kirkland and Carol Brochin what they thought would push the field forward: What would or should literacy studies and English education look like in the future including what collective priorities should be emphasized? We invited them to think together to imagine what might be possible or necessary in a world that is on fire. In giving these scholars the “last word” of our editorial term we are hoping that this effort toward intergenerational collaborative knowledge building can be one of the seeds of hope that will help us grow toward a better future.