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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.
(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.
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.
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.