This case study of an English methods course examines how preservice teachers demonstrate knowledge skills and dispositions for social justice teaching. Qualitative analyses of participants’ performances on two signature course assessments micro-teaching and unit planning show how opportunities to demonstrate socially just teaching practices are both afforded and missed. The study and course design draw from theories and practices of critical multicultural education culturally relevant teaching and equity literacy. Findings indicate that despite our best intentions course assessments did not fully support engagement with or applications of social justice principles.

In this Provocateur Piece we build a theory of poetic resonance through the interspersing of theory philosophy and literature with students’ voices and our own. The ideas sprang from an undergraduate English methods course we co-taught focused on micro-teaching. Throughout the essay we explore momentary encounters of resonance within and beyond pedagogical moves and students’ experiences engaging the particularities that shape lives in classrooms.

In this conceptual essay the author argues that computational methods and computer science more broadly should be embedded into English education programs. Positing that computational methods can deepen and expand the way literature is already taught in many English education programs and secondary English classrooms the author first makes a theoretical case for English educators to embrace computational methods then shares a prototypical assignment called a mixed literary analysis. The essay concludes with a series of concrete recommendations for English educators who wish to explore further how to embed computational methods into their professional pursuits and programs.

In this piece I draw on Erica McWilliam’s model of Meddler in the Middle to disrupt familiar notions of teaching. The Meddler in the Middle provides an alternative to existing teaching models—the Sage on the Stage and the Guide on the Side—and foregrounds twenty-first-century skills such as problem solving collaboration and critical thinking. I explore possibilities for meddling in the context of high school English classrooms and teacher education courses through my teaching experiences; then I contemplate how the Meddler might function in our current standards-based environment.

Many teachers still struggle to find a coherent and meaningful framework for incorporating new literacies into their instruction. This case study examines the teaching and learning that took place in a New and Multimodal Literacies class for preservice English teachers to understand how the ideas of connected learning are generative yet challenging as educators seek to create transformative technology-integrated and equity-oriented literacy learning experiences for students. Findings suggest that when teachers explore technological tools with connection in mind they can develop instructional experiences that forefront student interests and critical literacy learning. The study offers a vision of connected teaching to guide digital literacy teacher education into the future.

In this article we describe findings from a discourse community created for parents to discuss potentially controversial young adult literature. Focusing on participants’ reactions to All American Boys the study explores how parents responded to issues of racism in the United States and investigates how participants conceived of the text for their own children and in English classrooms. We distinguish four themes in the parents’ responses: identifying with injustice seeing Whiteness as a protection stereotypes versus individuality and reading as parents. Implications for preservice and inservice teachers as well as teacher educators involve preparation for leading difficult conversations and for working with parents toward transparency in classroom texts and topics.

This article focuses on Mr. Kurt a white first-year English teacher in an all-white context who has chosen to teach his students about whiteness white supremacy white privilege and the many ways institutionalized racism is enacted in daily life. I center this article on classroom scenarios that highlight the challenges embedded in dealing with race and whiteness in curriculum and classroom discussion. I conclude with a discussion of how possibilities for antiracist and social justice pedagogies in English education rely on the field’s willingness to embrace a more nuanced conversation and I offer implications for classroom practice at the K–12 and teacher education levels.

This provocation begins with an emotionally charged interracial encounter during peak-hour Cape Town traffic. It goes on to consider the manner in which emotional orientations constitute everyday internal white supremacist structures often camouflaged under the guise of caring. Later it calls on white educators to earnestly do the work of emotional excavation to avoid the reification reinforcement and reproduction of subtle well-intentioned forms of racism. Ultimately this piece contends that soulful justice work needs to accompany the social justice investments of white educators.

To counter inequitable hierarchical classroom structures research in the fields of language and literacy studies often looks to the affordances of online spaces such as affinity spaces for learning that is collaborative and knowledge that is distributed; yet researchers continue to locate theirstudies in virtual spaces outside classroom walls. This study situated in a high school writing class repositions the familiar classroom practice of peer feedback as a way to access affinity space features. Using qualitative case study design and grounded theory analysis the study reveals thatwhen supported by an emphasis on social connection the practice of peer feedback served as a portal for students with a range of writing experience and interest to collaborate and exchange honest feedback practices indicative of affinity space features. Yet traditional expectations preserved teacher roles and student roles in ways that prevented the class from more fully accessing the affinity space features of distributed expertise porous leadership and role flexibility. Discussion expands the field’s understanding of affinity spaces and their application in physical classrooms by outlining new features theorizing these classroom spaces and advocating for a reimagine dvision of peer feedback in ELA classrooms where role reciprocity and flexibility resist traditionalinequitable classroom structures.

In this article I propose Critical Race English Education (CREE) as a theoretical and pedagogical construct that tackles white supremacy and anti-black racism within English education and ELA classrooms. I employ autoethnography and counterstorytelling as methods that center my multiple identities and lived realities as I document my racialized and gendered experiences in relation to my journey to Ferguson MO and my experiences as a secondary ELA teacher. The research questions guiding this study are the following: (1) As a Black male English educator and language and literacy scholar how am I implicated in the struggle for racial justice and what does it mean for me to teach literacy in our present-day justice movement?; (2) How are Black lives mattering in ELA classrooms?; and (3) How are we using Black youth life histories and experiences to inform our mindset curriculum and pedagogical practices in the classroom?This article explicates findings from three interconnected stories that work to show how CREE can be operationalized to better understand the #BlackLivesMatter movement in its historical and contemporary dimensions. The data analyzed stem from my autobiographical narrativesobservations social media artifacts and images. I aim to expand English education to be more synergistically attuned to racial justice issues dealing with police brutality the mass incarceration of Black people and legacies of grassroots activism. This analysis suggests implications that aim to move the pedagogical practices around the intersections of anti-blackness and literacy from the margins to the center of discussion and praxis in ELA contexts.

Educators and researchers from a range of fields have devoted their careers to studying how reading develops and how to support students who find reading challenging. Some children struggle specifically with learning to decode print the central issue in what is referred to as dyslexia.However research has failed to identify unique characteristics or patterns that set apart students identified as dyslexic from other readers with decoding challenges. Nevertheless an authoritative discourse that speaks of a definitive definition a unique set of characteristics and a specific form of intervention saturates policy and practice around dyslexia and teacher educators are under increasing pressure to include this state-sanctioned information in their classes. Literacy educators’ experiences teaching reading in schools and preparing literacy professionals can add valuable perspectives to the conversation about dyslexia; however currently their voices are largely silent in conversations around dyslexia research policy and practice. The current research was designed to address this gap through an intensive interview study in which we employed a Disability Critical Race Studies framework along with Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse to explore the perspectives understandings and experiences of literacy teacher educators regarding dyslexia.

This article raises questions about the role of NCTE in an era of widespread education reform that often runs counter to a wide body of scholarship and members’ understandings of ways to build strong equitable educational systems. The authors call on NCTE to reinvent itself primarily as a space from which to take action toward equity and justice. This provocateur piece offers a loving critique of NCTE’s notion of advocacy at a time when neoliberal education reforms limit educators’ capacity to carry out our collective responsibilities to marginalized and vulnerable youth.

This case study of two secondary English teachers integrates a critical translingual approach in two urban classrooms. Our inquiry is guided by two questions: (1) How did two teachers engage critical translingual approaches in their classrooms? (2) How did their positionalities shape implementation of these approaches? This article illustrates how teachers’ stances and practices can be affected by their identities pointing to the ways that diverse teachers must approach their translanguaging pedagogies with an understanding of raciolinguistic ideologies. We end with a call for teacher educators to help teachers engage the transgressive elements of translanguaging in English classrooms and hone their raciolinguistic literacies so that they can design classroom learning in more humanizing ways.

Several writing studies have affirmed the literacies of young Black men in schooling contexts in humanizing ways which has importantly moved us beyond rationalizing their literacy practices in educational spaces. Less of this important research has directly focused on young Blackmen who are deemed academically high-achieving in traditional English language arts (ELA)classrooms. Thus academically high-achieving young Black men are often silent in literacy education and research; they have “untold stories” as described by Shawn the focal student inthis critical ethnographic case study. In an effort to provide literacy supports for these students and their ELA educators I developed a consequential literacy pedagogy. In this article I focuson consequential writing—one product of the consequential literacy pedagogy. Consequential writing concurrently develops academic and critical literacies. This layered literacy approach is intentionally developed by for and with historically marginalized communities to equip them to act against inequity within and beyond academic spaces through the learning teaching and sharing of writing. The current study cultivated consequential writing with a Black male student through a critical approach to metaphor. Metaphor is ideal for developing consequential writing due to its ability to simultaneously engage critical creative and cognitive literacies. In this paperI address the following research question: How did an academically high-achieving Black male secondary student utilize the generative power of metaphor to cultivate consequential writing?Next I illuminate the transferability of this work to support ELA educators in cultivating consequential writing with students beyond this study. Finally I discuss some unintended consequences of consequential writing for Black youth in academic spaces that do not honor their lives or minds.

The purpose of this article is to examine the metatheoretical differences that impact how runningrecords and miscue analysis differ in (a) the quantification of readers’ produced responses totext and (b) the analysis of oral reading behaviors. After providing historical and metatheoretical overviews of both procedures we present the data source which included 74 records of oral readings from an extant data set collected from an informal reading inventory. Each record was coded using running record and miscue analysis procedures. We used inferential statistics to examine relationships across conceptually similar items of analysis (for example the number oferrors or miscues). Findings from the inferential statistics show that there were significant positive correlations between three of the five conceptually similar items and a lack of statistically significant correlations between the use of meaning and grammar between running records and miscue analysis. Based on the findings we argue that both procedures which are often confused and conflated possess metatheoretical differences that influence how oral reading behaviors are interpreted. These differences in turn impact how reading ability is framed and socially constructed. We conclude with the significance of this research for education professionals.

Among the lessons that emerged after the recent presidential election is a recognition that teachers are generally not prepared to address the intersections of healing politics and emotion in classrooms. Now more than ever English educators must address trauma in classrooms while also recognizing how individuals and groups are positioned differently in the material and emotional stakes of this election. Drawing on research the voices of teachers and our experiences over this past year we call for more expansive conversations among English educators across perspectives concerned with creating safe relational anti-oppressive classrooms.

Learning to teach writing is a complex process influenced by many factors. Formative assessment holds promise as a place for preservice teachers to gain a better understanding of students’ unique struggles as writers and of writing as a complex challenging skill. The authors of this article describe how working with a dialogic method of formative assessment gave two preservice teachers unique insights about their students as writers and transformed their understanding of writing development. We argue for the benefits of incorporating more experience with formative writing assessment into the preservice education of English teachers.

This article describes the results of a study that examined middle school students’ written revisions as well as attitudes and perceptions regarding revision when paired with transmediation. Existing research on revision is thin on transmediation’s affordances and students’ voices regarding revision. Situated within a social semiotic multimodal literacy framework this article addresses how students began to see revision’s purpose and process as more meaningful and substantive as a result of transacting with their transmediated objects during a flash fiction unit of study.

This study presents a portrait of a White high school English teacher in an effort to understand the relationship between her White racial identity and her teaching about racism within a unit on A Raisin in the Sun in a predominantly White teaching context. The author argues that the teacher’s ambivalent White racial identity contributed to lack of clarity and conviction in terms of purpose which presented a pedagogical dilemma that ultimately undermined her practice. Acknowledging ambivalent identity and compensating for ambivalence in practice could provide pedagogical support for English teachers when they strive to teach about racism in secondary English classrooms.

This provocation addresses the prevalence of “scholarly laziness” in academic reading and considers its effect on scholarly writing in ELA and teacher education classrooms. The essay is constructed as twelve theses (a nod to the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and the contemporary propagation of standardized rubrics as doctrine). Blending narrative and scholarship these brief statements consider possible reasons for this so-called laziness ways it manifests in education and scholarship why it is a problem and possible approaches to encouraging more critical reading and writing practices among students preservice teachers and scholars.

This research examined how preservice teachers in a university classroom used discourse analysis of video-recorded lessons to explore how identity markers such as race shaped classroom interactions. Findings from the study indicated that preservice teachers employed 10 different discursive strategies to engage in critical conversations. Identifying these discursive strategies offered insight into preservice teachers’ entry points for engaging in such dialogue. From that information we offer potential narrative starters and questions that educators could use to deepen critical conversations in their English education courses.