This article documents the yearlong inquiry of a high school English teacher in New York City who participated in a networked professional learning community (PLC) of English educators exploring the question “How do we engage students in remote and hybrid learning situations in the current sociopolitical context?” Forced to teach remotely the teacher focused on building connections among her students using their feedback as a primary tool to design and improve responsive instruction. Through participation in the PLC and feedback from her students the teacher learned important lessons from others with others on behalf of her students and about her own processes of learning and thinking. This teacher’s journey offers several lessons for teacher education grounded in the influences of ecology and affective interactions on student engagement.

In this essay three teacher educators explore their individual pandemic-imposed online “zippered borders” (Fine 1994 p. 71). Their reflections on navigating the challenges that the past two years created for them and their students resulted in a deeper understanding of the hyphens of teaching various literacy and English language arts methods courses in a virtual setting. The authors’ respective journeys and collaborative sense-making of their commonalities provide critical insights and perhaps some inspiration for others to reflect and consider how our best efforts as teacher educators are still always in the hyphens.

Teacher-as-writer experiences in which teacher candidates engage deeply in their own writing and consider its implications for their pedagogies are common features of writing methods courses. However most existing research on these assignments has focused on the experiences of educators who write and will teach exclusively in English. We explore the experiences of bilingual teacher candidates who engaged in a teacher-as-writer assignment in our writing methods course which we redesigned through the lens of translanguaging pedagogies (García et al. 2016). Drawing on theories of translanguaging (García 2009) and raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa 2015) we describe how two teacher candidates experienced invitations to compose across languages in ways that were simultaneously empowering and complicated. Ultimately through this article we seek to bring needed recognition of linguistic and racial diversity to discussions of teacher-as-writer experiences and to highlight the pedagogical potential of translanguaging in writing teacher education.

Drawing from the Beliefs for Integrating Technology into the English Language Arts Classroom as well as prior scholarship on digitally mediated communication rhetorical studies and composition assessment and digital literacies this theoretical article presents a framework for creating and assessing digital multimodal compositions. The Interconnected Framework for Assessment of Digital Multimodal Composition conceptualizes digital multimodal composing through three interconnected and layered domains: audience mode and meaning and originality. Though the three domains are defined individually they are inextricably linked within the recursive processes and products of digital multimodal composing to contribute to intended meaning. The authors describe and justify the domains present assessment considerations and conclude with implications for practice and suggestions for designing assessments relevant to context and task.

Literacy normativities reinforce the colonial racist and anti-queer underpinnings of English education and today these normativities are propelled by the English teacher imagination. To render these normativities visible this study traces the affective reader responses of an inquiry community of queer educators and reveals normative reading practices that animate how English teachers imagine and feel their classroom worlds. In particular ordinary affects—those that are subtly felt and often overlooked—spotlight interpretive norms and normative feelings that hide the field’s ongoing commitments to colonization racism queerphobia and more. Contributing to Critical English Education (CEE) this article concludes by calling for multiple prisms of interpretation to dismantle literacy normativities in English education and ELA.

This study builds on research of multimodal storytelling in educational settings by presenting a study of a youth-produced documentary on immigration. Drawing from a video documentary project in a high school class we examine students’ representational processes of scaling in documentary storytelling and the kinds of resources they use to construct multiple spatiotemporal contexts for understanding their experience of immigration and immigration policy. Our theoretical framework relates the concept of scale to the Bakhtinian concept of voice to consider the semiotic resources that are used to index and connect multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in storytelling. Focusing on a documentary produced by some students in the class we analyze how the young filmmakers used particular speaker voices (characters) and their social positioning to invoke and construct relevant scales for understanding the problem of deportation. Our analysis extends the study of scaling to multimodal texts and the strategies that people use to represent and configure relationships among different socially stratified spaces. By conceptualizing the relations between voice and scale this work aims to contribute to literacy learning and teaching that support young people in bringing their knowledge experiences and narrative resources to engage with societal structures.

Student agency is an important construct for all students especially those marginalized because of their linguistic ethnic racial religious or migratory identities. Refugee-background students may experience marginalization according to many and sometimes all of these factors; agency is thus critical to understanding their negotiation of schooling in general and literacy tasks in particular. While many studies have explored various dimensions of agency we know little about how agency can be enacted and developed by minoritized students within instructional contexts. This qualitative case study addresses this gap by asking: How do two adolescent refugee-background students display evidence of agency when engaging in literacy tasks? What teacher practices contribute to facilitating or inhibiting student agency? Data sources include classroom observations student work samples and interviews with students and teachers. Data analysis was conducted using a combined inductive/deductive approach. Findings reveal three agentive practices through which students engaged in literacy tasks: agentive resistance leading to disaffection agentive resistance of imposed identities and interactive negotiated engagement. While the first practice led to disengagement the latter two led to opportunities for students to agentively reshape dehumanizing narratives of multilingual refugee-background students. Teacher agency in curriculum planning and implementation was essential in guiding students to either engage in or resist literacy tasks. Since the forced displacement that refugee-background and some immigrant students experience is contrary to the concept of self-determination we argue that engaging them in an agentive manner has the potential to help students reclaim that sense of agency within classrooms and challenge deficit perceptions.

In this article we examine a teacher candidate’s beliefs teaching practices and challenges to and supports for critical pedagogy during student teaching at an urban middle school. We also consider whether involvement in an ELA methods course influenced the teacher candidate’s beliefs and/or teaching practices particularly regarding writing. Through this inquiry we identify ways to better support teacher candidates in learning and enacting critical pedagogy in English language arts.

This article discusses activities and actions for English language arts (ELA) educators to engage in antiracist praxis and humanizing pedagogy through unpacking the common activity of classroom name introductions. The author highlights how learning students’ names can involve honoring nondominant histories of racially minoritized communities. Implications of this (re)active praxis include the potential to sustain marginalized students in ELA classrooms by promoting broader racial and linguistic justice.

There is a particular urgency in this political moment to understand children’s experiences with current events. Drawing from data generated following the 2016 presidential election this paper focuses on three racially and linguistically diverse children’s persuasive compositions. Within a critical literacies writing unit focused on (im)migrant experiences children called on legislators to act on the Republican administration’s policies. Building on the understanding that all literacies are political and that teaching and learning are value-laden tasks the author engaged a cultural rhetorics orientation—grounded in the understanding of texts bodies materials and ideas as interconnected aspects of communication—for data generation and analysis. The findings highlight how children strategically employed rhetoric to persuade. They used logos pathos and ethos as well as story a central tool for meaning-making and building practices in the world. Ultimately this study demonstrates how children when properly supported can agentively participate in critical literacies and act on real-world politics. Through the stories of young children this study emphasizes what children have to tell adults and what a cultural rhetorics orientation through its emphasis on story enables literacies researchers and educators to understand about children’s composing.

Writing studies scholars have long examined how race- and class-based hierarchies shape teachers’ and students’ experiences of writing in US universities. But universities are also workplaces that profit from a racialized writing economy in which laborers of color (Marko et al. 2015) underpin writing production. Drawing from a yearlong qualitative case study that examines the writing practices of university custodial workers this article addresses the following research questions: What kinds of writing do university custodial workers use and practice? What are the conditions for their writing? And what do these practices and conditions tell us about writing in race- and class-stratified workplaces including educational institutions? Using critical race (Ahmed 2012; Bell 2013; Crenshaw et al. 1995; Delgado Bernal 2003; Delgado & Stefancic 2013; Patton 2016; Yosso et al. 2009) approaches to literacy sponsorship (Brandt 2001) and observations and interviews with university custodians this article discusses two main findings: (1) labor conditions restrict participants’ writing as a part of race and class hierarchies; and (2) the participants employ writing practices that run under the radar of institutional restrictions to serve their own purposes. This study’s findings have implications for workplace writing scholarship and higher education policy because they expand definitions of and purposes for workplace writing in institutions of education.

Multiple ELA teacher educators share assignments created for their ELA methods courses that intentionally connect to the development of critical agentic active ethical reflective and socially just ELA teachers a specific objective of methods coursework addressed in the ELATE position statement Beliefs about Methods Courses and Field Experiences in English Education.

This article examines the need to implement practical methods for helping teacher candidates in English language arts develop effective dispositions. The author suggests that candidates compose proleptic autobiographies—a form of discourse that describes an envisioned future as if it has occurred in the past—as a way to articulate the professional identities and dispositions to which they aspire. Citing examples from proleptic autobiographies composed by preservice teachers the author discusses emergent dispositions and the benefits they may yield including increased pedagogical creativity enhanced knowledge and skills and greater retention among early-career teachers.

This case study which investigates twenty-four 11th-grade students of American literature asks: What successes and challenges did students experience when reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through a critical race theory (CRT)/critical Whiteness studies (CWS) lens? Findings reveal that applying a CRT/CWS lens helped students understand and identify CRT/CWT tenets while reading the novel and extrapolate these tenets to their social worlds. However 42 percent of students resisted the unit by using the White Talk discourse strategy of wishing they could “just read the book”; other students demonstrated White rage. The study offers several implications for ELA teacher education.

Research shows that preservice English teachers (PSETs) lack opportunities to respond to student writing and that they may view student writing through a deficit lens. To address this need the authors developed the Writing Mentors (WM) program a digital field placement that gave PSETs experience providing feedback to high school writers. In this analysis we examine how PSETs’ views of response were shaped by their digital interactions with high school writers. The challenges of interacting asynchronously created opportunities for PSETs to identify limitations in the mode of communication propose approaches to providing feedback and reflect on how teacher feedback can nurture or constrain relationships with students. These findings point to the promise of critical reflection on the disruptive potential of digital feedback for supporting PSTs’ response to student writing.

Sex (sexual acts) and sexuality (sexual orientation and gender identity) have become common topics in the news and public discourse. Although sex and sexuality influence adolescents’ experiences with school and schooling conversely shapes youth sexualities research shows that schools do little to help adolescents make sense of their developing sexual identities. We believe that ELA classrooms are a natural fit for addressing this shortfall. Using the journey of one ELA teacher we illustrate the ways that issues of sex and sexuality influenced and shaped students’ and their teacher’s classroom experiences. We seek to encourage ELA teachers to rethink the implications of sidestepping issues of sex and sexuality in their classrooms.

This study explores a practice-based approach to learning to facilitate dialogically oriented textbased discussions. Through an exploration of rehearsals of discussion facilitation in a summer professional development program we identify two types of framing for coaching moments: ones that attend to generalities of discussion and ones that attend to novelty in discussion. We find that attention to generalities helps develop teachers’ efficiency in facilitation while attention to novelty helps develop an ability to innovate in response to students’ contributions. We consider how English teacher educators might balance a focus on efficiency with a focus on innovation in light of the value of adaptive expertise supporting teachers’ implementation of dialogic discussions.

An increased emphasis on writing standards has led many U.S. states to incorporate on-demand writing assessments into their test-based accountability system. We argue this creates political and pedagogical tensions for teachers to navigate. We discuss how rubric conceptualization (1) is a process wherein a teacher iteratively (co-)constructs meaning from a rubric’s design via classroom instruction; (2) is informed by implicit theories of learning; and (3) often requires a teacher to negotiate the competing pedagogical and political meanings of a rubric. While test-based accountability frameworks promote rubric use that equates learning with student achievement rubric conceptualization is a process where teachers have some agency to resist behaviorist approaches to instruction.