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English Language Arts/ Research
Collaborative Design as Mediated Praxis: Professional Development for Socially Just Pedagogies
In this study we examine a multiyear professional development program designed to help English teachers incorporate connected learning into their classrooms. We propose a model of professional learning we term collaborative design as mediated praxis which refines and extends the five features of high-quality professional development and takes into account a focus on social justice and equity. A variety of data were collected for the study including recordings of planning meetings teachers’ reflections and teachers’ unit plans. Analysis focused specifically on rich points (Agar 2000) that occurred during the workshop and follow-up meetings revealing tensions between university- and school-based educators as they engaged in the collaborative design process.
Generative Principles for Professional Learning for Equity-Oriented Urban English Teachers
This article investigates the experiences of three early-career secondary English urban teachers who sought to strengthen their perspectives and practices of social justice teaching through professional development. Data include teacher interviews across their first three years of teaching artifacts across three participants representing their professional development experiences and teaching and learning in their classrooms and interviews of three informants who participated in professional development with two of the teacher participants. We then conducted a thematic analysis. We found six generative features of professional development/professional learning that promoted these urban teachers’ development as equity-oriented English teachers. This paper contributes to the knowledge base on professional development/professional learning in urban contexts in that it is the first to foreground urban teachers’ needs for professional development that promotes their equity-oriented educational stances and practices and that illuminates how productive principles for professional learning can facilitate meeting those needs.
Professional Development as Publicly Engaged Scholarship in Urban Schools: Implications for Educational Justice, Equity, and Humanization
In this article we describe the promise of professional development for teachers by considering the following questions: (1) What do teachers who work in urban public schools see as the intended purposes of professional development and what do they identify as their needs? (2) Can a move from professional development as absent of what teachers say they need to professional development as publicly engaged scholarship center justice equity and humanization in teaching and learning? To address these questions we analyze qualitative data from preK–12 teachers teacher educators and education support professionals who participated in a professional development initiative in an urban school district in the U.S. Midwest.
Reconciling Rosenblatt and the New Critics: The Quest for an “Experienced Understanding” of Literature
Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reader response has been widely accepted as a means of resisting the hegemony of New Criticism. This article argues that Rosenblatt and the New Critics were pioneers of parallel rather than opposing pedagogical traditions shaped by the shared influence of I. A. Richards and John Dewey. The article situates a close reading of Rosenblatt and the New Critics in the context of the historical conditions that influenced the reception of the two supposedly disparate methods of teaching literature. At a time when misinformed caricatures of both Reader Response and New Criticism figure prominently in professional and political discourse about the teaching of literature a careful reimagining of Rosenblatt’s relationship with the New Critics may allow for more nuanced conversation about the place of close reading in the teaching and learning of literature.
Place, Pedagogy, and Literacy in Appalachia
Place-based pedagogy the incorporation of local dynamics into the classroom as a step toward bridging the school-community gap is becoming increasingly popular as educating for sustainability gains traction in schools. However little attention has been paid to the role Appalachia has played in creating our modern sense of place-based pedagogy in education writ large and English education in particular. This article explores this role to argue for greater respect for Appalachian literacies throughout the field and a greater incorporation of place-based pedagogy within Appalachian English classrooms today.
Provocateur Piece: Teaching Sex Education with Poetry: An Intimate Coupling
It is not unusual for issues of sexuality to surface sometimes in high school English classes. Howeverexplicitly teaching such topics can concurrently enhance students’ sexual and English literacy experiences as the author discovered in her ninth-grade English class in Western Canada when she used poetry as a vehicle for learning about topics such as healthy relationships consent sexual assault and safe sex practices. This provocation closes with a narrative poem the author composed in an effort to capture the experience of one particularly revealing lesson from this unit.
Arts-Based Literacy Learning Like “New School”: (Re)Framing the Arts in and of Students’ Lives as Story
While arts-based has received increased attention in recent years as a research methodology rooted in an aesthetic framework less attention has been paid to conceptualizing what arts-based means in the context of particular disciplines of K–12 teaching and learning. This qualitative study recognizes a need to examine sustained and ongoing approaches to the teaching of English through art in an effort to better understand and articulate what art can do for literacy learning. I explore art as story as one way of conceptualizing a central role for art in English class where art serves as a tool for engagement and as the material for ongoing inquiry.
Provocateur Piece*: The Paper Bag
In this creative nonfiction essay the author recounts her first day of school and earliest experience with being publicly embarrassed by a school teacher; this event is one of her few memories of kindergarten. Now a literacy teacher educator she understands and describes how this early experience with schooling was marked by a probable cultural mismatch. This piece has the potential to foster conversations in teacher education and literacy classrooms about the assumptions that shape teachers’ expectations for the funds of knowledge that students may (or may not) bring to the classroom.
The Value of English: Perspectives on the Economic Benefits of Studying English in High School
This exploratory study investigates English education professors’ beliefs about the economic value of studying English language arts (ELA). In response to a 44-item cross-sectional survey 140 professors clarified their beliefs about which economic benefits are and should be offered in high school ELA classes; how ELA classes are and should be designed to deliver those benefits; how much curricular attention is and should be given to economic benefits compared to other components of ELA; and whether ELA’s economic benefits should receive more attention in the future. The article identifies patterns in professors’ thinking about the economic payoff of ELA. These patterns are read against five common models of ELA’s economic value. The article concludes with a discussion of what respondents’ answers suggest about competing conceptions of the organization and purposes of ELA and K–12 schools.
Prospective English Teachers Learn to Respond to Diversity in Students’ Writing through the Student Writing Archive Project (SWAP)
Responding to students’ writing is integral to English teaching. However preservice secondary English teachers (PSETs) often have few opportunities to practice this skill or to see how experienced teachers respond to diverse writers. I built an online database of students’ writing teacher feedback and teacher interviews; 32 PSETs in my English methods courses explored this database in conjunction with fieldwork in local classrooms. In this article I analyze PSETs’ database discussion forum posts comments on field-placement students’ writing and reflections about learning to provide feedback. Reading teachers’ feedback positioned PSETs as students evoking recollections about receiving teacher feedback while writing their own feedback positioned them as teachers evoking visions of what a writing teacher must do/be to claim authority in the classroom. All but two PSETs provided feedback of the kind they had claimed to hate. Those two adapted approaches they encountered in the database learning to draw on their own writing histories as resources for responding with authority.
Provocateur Piece : A History of Our Field
As a field of study English has a far more recent history than most educators realize. While the subject is taught in each of the 35000 secondary schools and 4000 colleges in the United States most English teachers know relatively little about the field’s origins or trajectory. “A History of Our Field” makes its way through major moves and figures that have helped to transform and define our subject shedding light on our past. The five response poems that follow trouble extend and make personal this history. As a collection the poems embody the field’s past present and future debates in a form that is both entertaining and educative playful and serious.
How English Language Arts Teachers Are Prepared for Twenty-First-Century Classrooms: Results of a National Study
A national study of English teacher preparation in U.S. colleges and universities revealed that faculty address changes in content and context salient to English education particularly curricular demographic political and technological changes through initiatives at both the program and methods course levels. Programs require many hours of field placements and high numbers of credit hours in the subject area and in subject-specific methods and also distribute the responsibility for addressing institutional and pedagogical change across courses. Methods courses raise awareness of focal issues and allow opportunities for preservice teachers to discuss these issues. However opportunities are scarcer for applying knowledge by putting it into practice. This article discusses tensions in English education as they relate to conceptual coherence at the program and course levels as well as tensions between what we call awareness versus application.
Critical Questioning in and beyond the Margins: Teacher Preparation Students’ Multimodal Inquiries into Literacy Assessment
This article explores the potential of using multimodal texts—particularly comics—as a way of engaging teacher education students in critical inquiry around literacy and ELA assessments. We describe a qualitative study into the use of a multimodal comics-form article within an ELA/literacy assessment course in an MEd program. Our findings suggest that teacher preparation students were able to effectively remix and play with both comics tropes and more traditional “academic” writerly discourses. The use of multimodal texts in teacher preparation helped students engage in dialogic and critical forms of inquiry around issues related to classroom practices and policies. We end by suggesting ways that English teacher educators can include similar texts and activities in their courses and teacher preparation programs.
#Say[ing]HerName as Critical Demand: English Education in the Age of Erasure
In the wake of racial violence teacher educators literacy scholars and classroom teachers are looking for ways to teach about in/equities and in/justice. In this article I position #SayHerName as an entry point for educators and scholars to think about how English education and English language arts classrooms can become spaces to address injustice against Black women. In drawing on the work of Black and decolonial feminists I advocate for educators and scholars to teach about the lives of Black women using Black women’s autobiographies. I position #SayHerName as a critical Black and decolonial feminist demand through which students can (a) begin to learn about the historical and contemporary contributions of Black women (b) recognize the intricate links between Black women’s lived experiences and political activism and (c) see their lives as grounds for political and social change.
Imagining a Language of Solidarity for Black and Latinx Youth in English Language Arts Classrooms
In this article I argue that English educators must interrogate acts of physical and linguistic violence against Black and Latinx youth and take them into consideration when shaping curricula. English teachers can provide a space for youth to make sense of their racialized experiences. I highlight the marginal treatment of Black and Latinx languages in English classrooms and show the relationship between the racialized physical violence against Black and Latinx communities and the linguistic violence many Black and Latinx youth face in English classrooms. I then present examples of emerging solidarity movements between Black and Latinx activists and communities and illustrate how this renewed sense of solidarity can be leveraged to incite transformative learning experiences. I conclude with recommendations for how a language of solidarity framework can take place in all English classrooms.
Provocateur Piece*: Difficult Knowledge: When a Black Feminist Educator Was Too Afraid to #SayHerName
In this Provocateur Piece the author shares her regrets mistakes and fears in hopes that more conversations about how educators especially Black female educators who are on the front lines of educating students about race-centered violence toward women have a space to wrestle with the difficult knowledge and task of teaching anti-Black state-sanctioned violence toward Black women while dealing with the reality that their lives and spirits are also in danger.
The Stories They Tell: Mainstream Media, Pedagogies of Healing, and Critical Media Literacy
Pedagogies of healing and critical media literacy are important especially in the wake of racial violence when mainstream media work to stigmatize characterize and marginalize Black youth by projecting them as dangerous Others. In this article we offer an overview of how mainstream media reinscribe and reinforce white supremacy which leads to anti-blackness. Next we discuss the impact that uncritical consumption of mainstream media narratives of Black people has on media consumers and how Black youth use social media as counter spaces. We then theorize about pedagogies of healing and critical media literacy as tools to encourage Black youth to investigate dismantle and rewrite the damaging narratives. We conclude with sample lesson plans and a discussion of how English educators have a responsibility to use our discipline to transform our world and raise awareness of the crisis of racial injustice.
Dartmouth Revisited: Three English Educators from Different Generations Reflect on the Dartmouth Conference
Fifty years ago in 1966 the Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching of English later known as the Dartmouth Conference brought together English educators from three nations—the United States England and Canada—to discuss the future of the school subject of English. The Dartmouth Conference is now considered to be a watershed moment in the teaching of English. In this article three English educators from three generations reflect on the meaning and significance of the Dartmouth Conference.
Writing 2.0: How English Teachers Conceptualize Writing with Digital Technologies
This article draws on a longitudinal study generated by a school and university-based partnership and funded by an Improving Teacher Quality grant. This study uses Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Cole 1996; Engeström & Miettinen 1999; Wertsch 1991) and social semiotic theories of multimodality (Jewitt 2006; Kress 2010) to examine how a group of secondary English teachers conceptualized writing process pedagogy and digital tool use after a week-long professional development program. Teachers used the online software program Prezi to create concept maps that showed their understanding of the concept of Writing 2.0. A CHAT and multimodal analysis indicated a number of contradictions. Examining such contradictions in teacher thinking is essential for understanding teachers’ agency in using new tools within multiple activity systems that often have competing values and goals.
Honoring All Learners: The Case for Embedded Honors in Heterogeneous English Language Arts Classrooms
Tracking and other practices of homogeneously grouping students by so-called ability level remain a norm in American classrooms despite decades of research highlighting how they disserve and even harm student learning. Heterogeneous grouping by contrast benefits struggling learners a conclusion supported by a substantial body of research. Some of that research cautions however that these benefits may be perceived as coming at the expense of higher-performing classmates’ learning. This article reviews the literature contemporary case studies and the author’s personal experience to argue for and provide specific models of a heterogeneous English language arts (ELA) classroom. These models use deliberate practices of differentiated instruction to serve learners at all ability levels and furthermore do so in a manner that integrates the possibility for students to earn “honors” credit. The article argues that ELA is perhaps the ideal discipline in which to enact such structural shifts creating heterogeneous classrooms that work to the advantage of all learners.
Provocateur Pieces: Teaching Story
This provocation is a personal essay of creative nonfiction. Playing with form the piece offers three scenes separated by a series of multiple-choice questions; readers must use this standardized-test format to create meaning and understand the text itself the nature of today’s high-stakes tests the story’s characters and the essence of teaching. While the names of the students and one staff member have been changed to protect their privacy the events are true to the author’s experience.
Developing Curriculum to Support Black Girls’ Literacies in Digital Spaces
Teacher educators literacy scholars and classroom teachers are beginning to develop curricula that leverage digital literacy practices and make visible what elementary students are learning across modalities. Although this body of work provides valuable examples (e.g. digital storytelling innovative uses of digital apps and platforms creating podcasts and integration of tablets) of twentyfirst-century literacies in action little is known about how these curricular choices support Black girls as they navigate digital spaces. In this article I employ a Black girls’ literacies framework to better understand how classroom teachers can design curriculum with layered opportunities for Black girls to develop critical literacy practices in digital spaces. This framework makes visible how digital tools can (1) highlight technological capabilities (2) promote exploration of social issues (3) promote agency and confidence with digital literacies and (4) showcase learning across modalities as Black girls navigate their multiple political/critical historical intellectual collaborative and identity-laden literacies.
Black Girls and Critical Media Literacy for Social Activism
Despite the largely degrading media representations of Blackness historically Black girls and women have been strong activists disrupting narratives the media conveys about Black girl- and womanhood. Centering Black girls’ lived experience through critical media literacy can give them the opportunity to develop the language to identify deconstruct and problematize the complexity of power operating in media and negotiate visibility by counternarrating racist sexist and classist media narratives with authentic stories of Black girlhood. This article centralizes Black girls in media literacy by articulating the aims of the individual and collective endeavors of the Black Girls’ Literacies Collective (BGLC). The author unpacks critical media literacy for classroom teachers and shares practical ways to employ media literacy for youth social activism to alter the educational landscape to effect change.
Provocateur Pieces: At the Kitchen Table: Black Women English Educators Speaking Our Truths
In this Provocateur Piece the authors featured in the themed issue re-create a virtual kitchen table talk where they dialogue across their respective work as English teacher educators and scholars who foreground Black feminist/womanist epistemologies in their personal social and professional lives. They discuss what it means to be Black women mothers sisters and daughters who do work with Black girls in K–12 educational settings and Black women in teacher education. Why is it critical that all educators acknowledge Black girls’ literacies in their work? How are Black girls’ literacies honored in our work? What does it mean for us as Black women educators to do this work? How does it enrich our lives? What are the challenges? The piece ends with an open letter to Black girls as an affirming call for their reclaiming and redefining of their literate selves.
Centering Black Girls’ Literacies: A Review of Literature on the Multiple Ways of Knowing of Black Girls
In light of the current assaults on Black girls and misaligned instructional practices in and outside of schools across the nation English educators need to understand a more complete vision of the identities girls create for themselves and the literacies and practices needed to best teach them. This article provides a review of literature of Black girl literacies by examining historical theoretical and empirical research conducted across the past several decades. These literatures are organized into themes and threads that help to illustrate the pedagogies for English educators of Black girls. The authors provide implications for literacy practice policy and research that center Black girls’ ways of knowing and suggest a Black girls’ literacies framework as an impetus for English teaching and teacher education.
Instruction Matters: Secondary English Preservice Teachers’ Implementation of Cognitively Demanding Writing Tasks
Research on writing tasks suggests that cognitively demanding tasks are important for student learning. Though a great deal is known about high-quality writing instruction less is known about how teachers through their instruction support students to complete tasks at a high level. This qualitative study examines three preservice teachers’ writing instruction to understand how their instruction does—and sometimes does not—support the demands of the tasks that they provided for their students. The findings suggest that preservice teachers’ instruction appears to align with expectations for good writing instruction (e.g. using models) but that they often struggle to enact these practices in a way that supports the complexity of the tasks.
Provocateur Pieces: “My Black Kids Are Not Sub-Pops”: Reflecting on the Impact of Standardized Testing in English Education
This Provocateur Piece recounts the story of Francis from teacher preparation to her decision to exit the profession after five years. I seek to provide a space for English educators to step back and think about how we prepare and support ELA teachers. Francis was prepared and able to celebrate the diversity of her students and her classrooms were spaces of equity and respect. And yet she is leaving the profession. Why? What can we do to keep this from happening?
“Perhaps These Are Not Poetic Times at All”: Using Poetry to Cope with and Critique a High-Stakes Teacher Performance Assessment
This study takes a fine-grained look at the inaugural implementation of a high-stakes teacher performance assessment (the edTPA) from multiple perspectives and chronicles how participants used the reading writing and discussion of poetry to cope with and sometimes critique the edTPA. Teacher researchers sought to understand multiple perspectives of stakeholders associated with the English education program in which each played a role. Other participants included seven English education teacher candidates and five mentor teachers from candidates’ student teaching placements. Data included lesson plans instructional materials and student work from the seminar candidates took during student teaching email messages among stakeholders official edTPA communications field notes and stakeholder interviews. Findings are organized around the functions of poetry for managing the edTPA revealed by the analysis. The study suggests that reading writing and discussing poetry can assist candidates and teacher educators in navigating a high-stakes assessment through reflective practice.
In Memoriam: Dedication to Kent Williamson
Some of Kent Williamson’s friends and colleagues share remembrances of Kent.
Opening George Hillocks’s Territory of Literature
In this companion to George Hillocks’s final article two of his students explore the “territory of literature” he maps out for teachers. We examine three claims George stakes in his territory:First teachers and students should understand literature as a source of argument about moral and philosophical concepts; second a sophisticated understanding of literature demands a set of explicit typologies that students can follow; and third students need a systematic way of identifying and interpreting the effects of literary devices and rhetoric. Then we look beyond George’s article to consider additional sources and critical approaches to teaching through concepts typologies and a rhetoric of literature. As members of the next generation of “Hillocksian” English educators we argue that George’s territory can be open land home to many literary traditions and visions.
The Territory of Literature
George Hillocks’s final work of scholarship (edited by Peter Smagorinsky) represents Hillocks’s approach to developing a literature curriculum.
Provocateur Pieces*: Bishop Ampleforth Is Not a Pawn
This piece is a satirical look at the stultifying state of the English classroom in an age of over-testing. Bishop the eponymous new student at Henry Ford High School attempts to make sense of his classroom where students prepare for the next in a parade of tests that will measure their creativity. In this dystopia writing has been completely codified distilled to a series of formulae mechanisms and flow charts that purport to deliver writers to proficiency. Layered with themes of power politics and dehumanization the piece endeavors to caricature the folly of over-measurement while providing catharsis to those whose real-life classrooms are all too similar to the one depicted. The piece is followed by an actual missive the author received from his union representative after this piece had been accepted that demonstrates how fact isn’t far from fiction: life indeed imitates art.
Recalculation in Teacher Preparation: Challenging Assumptions through Increased Community Contact
The ethnic racial and cultural backgrounds of students in PreK–12 US schools are becoming increasingly diverse. However the teacher candidates (TCs) populating teacher education programs are overall not representative of this student diversity. To encourage the TCs enrolled in an undergraduate English education program to better understand the diverse communities in which they would teach I developed and incorporated a Community Inquiry Project into their required coursework. As students completed the assignments associated with the project they reflected on their experiences. An analysis of the reflections of three participants demonstrates how contact with the people and places of the community influenced their understandings of the community itself as well as of themselves as future teachers. This work draws from critical multiculturalism and contact theory to demonstrate how contact with community members during teacher education coursework can encourage TCs to name and question their own assumptions about others as they cultivate a more contextualized and diverse understanding of students.
“I’m Fighting My Fight, and I’m Not Alone Anymore”: The Influence of Communities of Inquiry
This case study explores an urban secondary literacy teacher’s involvement in communities of inquiry over time. I draw on data from a multiyear study that documented the intellectual work of a community of teacher candidates I worked with as an instructor in a literacy methods course and cofounder of an inquiry community they participated in during their first two years in the classroom. Using document analysis and interviews with the focal teacher Laura conducted five years after the initial study I explore how participation in critical inquiry-based teacher education and teacher research communities in her early years in the classroom led Laura to initiate change-oriented collaborations in her ongoing professional practice. I conclude with a discussion of how inquiry can support preservice and inservice teachers—particularly those working in embattled and underfunded urban schools in a time of heightened accountability—to develop activist orientations toward educational policy critical solidarity with peers and relational approaches to educating diverse students.
Editorial: Honoring Our History, Envisioning Our Future
In their first editorial new editors Tara Star Johnson and sj Miller discuss their scholarly backgrounds and their plans for the journal which include a call for work demonstrating diverse perspectives and multidisciplinary approaches.
Provocateur Pieces: White Abjections: Language and Feeling in the Urban English Classroom
This provocation explores the abjective e/affects of white ideology manifested as school language in the United States. Through recursive engagement and symbolic play with her memory of watching a student eat toilet paper during a College Essay Writing class the author challenges the institutional grammars that shape a collective sense of “school.” Through a critical analysis of the shared “public transcript” (Scott 1990) of many urban schools the author considers the ways in which students and teachers get summoned into particular social existences in relation to whiteness as the dominant culture of power. She uses both written and visual languages to offer poetryas a site of theory towards reinscribing the relationship between language feeling and address in the urban English classroom and inciting new socially just structures of learning. The author’s sketches of this memory drawn with ink on toilet paper intervene throughout the article giving her provocation an added dimensionality.
John Dewey, the Common Core, and the Teaching of English
In addition to being one of the authors of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) David Colemanhas become the Standards’ “most visible advocate” (Smith Appleman & Wilhelm 2014 p. 10) and one of their “most prominent and articulate promoters” (Rabinowitz & Bancroft 2014 p. 4). Ina talk titled “Bringing the Common Core to Life” delivered to the New York State Department of Education Coleman (2011) moves beyond promoting the CCSS to explaining and modeling his vision of “what we must do” (p. 16) when teaching complex informational texts. This article illuminates the regressive nature of Coleman’s pedagogical prescriptions by juxtaposing them with the more progressive approaches to literary education proposed by John Dewey and by referring to research that demonstrates the deleterious effects of the strategies Coleman advocates.
Racial and Related Forms of Specialist Knowledge on English Education Blogs
This article explores how the computer-mediated communication (CMC) tool of blogging served as a teaching and learning tool about diversity and inequity in English education. It analyzes the blog writings of two preservice teachers who used their blogs as a space to encourage themselves and their peers to consider racial linguistic and other forms of diversity and inequality and what these issues meant for English education. The analysis advances understandings of the potentials and limits of CMCs to foster dialogue and knowledge building among preservice teachers in relation to diversity and inequality in education.
Opening the Conversation: Handing Over the Conversation: Our Final Editorial
In this our final editorial we reflect back on the goals outlined in our first editorial (October 2010) and what we accomplished in the past five years.Our vision for English Education was “to continue the solid reputation for both excellence and collegiality that has been built over the last four decades†(p. 6). We hope that you the reader feel we were successful in meeting this vision.
English Teachers’ Online Participation as Professional Development: A Narrative Study
This article presents research from a qualitative study investigating five secondary English teachers’ experiences participating online (via blogs microblogs and social network sites) in exploration of teaching learning and literacy. With narratives from collected interview data the authors conducted a thematic analysis to identify common patterns and a structural analysis to underscore the narrative content. Participants constructed narratives that revealed several themes including those addressing shifts in their teaching practices their sense of isolation and their identities as writers. This study stands to support more nuanced understandings of teachers’ efforts to supplement their professional growth by creating new content on the Web and engaging in active dialogue online with distant colleagues.
Navigating the Text Selection Gauntlet: Exploring Factors That Influence English Teachers’ Choices
This article details the results of a survey project that seeks to understand the factors that influence teachers’ decisions about instructional texts in the English classroom. The survey delivered to 339 teachers in a western state where the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been adopted asked teachers to identify influential factors in these decisions to discuss challenges they face in selecting texts and to speculate about the possible influence of the CCSS on these decisions. The results indicate that teachers attempt to make careful decisions about texts weighing curricular factors as well as student needs and interests. However teachers make these decisions in complicated contexts where resources are tight and practices such as whole-class novel study make these decisions difficult to make well. These results suggest that teacher educators evaluate traditional practices such as the whole-class novel to improve educational practice in English classrooms.
Opening the Conversation: Value-Added Models and Why We Should All Be Worried
The editors discuss the problems associated with using value-added models for assessing teacher effectiveness.
Extending the Conversation: “Inducing Colored Sisters of Other Places to Imitate Their Example”: Connecting Historic Literary Societies to a Contemporary Writing Group
In this thought-provoking piece Muhammad articulates the development of a literacy collaborative for African American adolescent girls with an eye toward replicating practices adopted by the Female Literary Association of Philadelphia and other similar societies established in the mid-1800s. Muhammad outlines the features of the literacy collaborative and presents the benefits it evoked for participants including the reading of mentor texts freedom to write openly without censorship and uninterrupted writing time.
“Looking Back I Can See” Literate Tensions and Changes: A Veteran Teacher’s Cross-Contextual Analysis of His Literate Life
This article details the results of a survey project that seeks to understand the factors that influence teachers’ decisions about instructional texts in the English classroom. The survey delivered to 339 teachers in a western state where the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been adopted asked teachers to identify influential factors in these decisions to discuss challenges they face in selecting texts and to speculate about the possible influence of the CCSS on these decisions. The results indicate that teachers attempt to make careful decisions about texts weighing curricular factors as well as student needs and interests. However teachers make these decisions in complicated contexts where resources are tight and practices such as whole-class novel study make these decisions difficult to make well. These results suggest that teacher educators evaluate traditional practices such as the whole-class novel to improve educational practice in English classrooms.
Opening the Conversation: We Will Never Get It All Done
Editors Rush and Scherff introduce the articles in this issue and reflect on the pressures of teaching.
The Stormy Times of James Moffett
This article discusses the published work and career of James Moffett (1929–96) focusing in particular on Kanawha County West Virginia in the 1970s when his innovative textbook series—Interaction after adoption by the county was opposed by local and national conservative activists. The series was ultimately dropped by the district following a highly publicized protracted and at-times violent conflict after which other districts around the country followed suit shutting down the series. The article examines Moffett’s response to the censorship battle explores his later interestin spirituality and literacy and considers the implications of his work and his career trajectory for the teaching of English today.
Extending the Conversation: A Catalyst for Change: Staging Dramatics for Preservice English Teachers through Improv, Role-Play, and Collaborative Reflection
This article proposes that staging dramatic activities and collaborative reflection in English education courses accelerates preservice student learning about their subject matter themselves and their’future students. The elastic nature of dramatics matches the pressing demand for excellence in preservice teacher preparation for 21st century ELA classrooms.
“I Love to Flip the Pages”: Preservice Teachers and New Literacies within a Field Experience
It is sometimes assumed that “digital natives” will more easily integrate new literacies into their classrooms once they begin their careers. This study followed preservice teachers at the junior level—who were taking part in a year-long field experience set in an urban high school. This field experience was set in the context of an English education methods course focusing on integrating new—literacies into the English classroom. Interviews blog posts and survey responses suggest that many of the preservice teachers (born around 1990) expressed some of the same traditional views about—using technology as teachers of an older generation. With some exceptions most of the preservice teachers saw new literacies as best used to motivate students to learn traditional content.
Preparing Preservice Teachers to Become Teachers of Writing: A 20-Year Review of the Research Literature
University teacher education programs are the “foremost settings for learning how to teach” (Smagorinsky et al. 2003). Yet how to prepare preservice teachers to teach writing has received little attention from literacy researchers. Despite research reviews for reading teacher research currently one does not exist for writing teacher education. This article attempts to address this gap by presenting a 20-year literature review (1990–2010) of peer-reviewed studies focused on preparing preservice teachers to teach writing.
Knotty Articulations: Professors and Preservice Teachers on Teaching Literacy in Urban Schools
In this qualitative study we examined preservice teachers’ articulations of what it meant to teach literacy in urban settings and the roles that we as university instructors played in their understandings of the terms urban literacy and teacher. We framed the study within extant studies of teacher education and research on metaphors. Data indicated that the participants metaphorically constructed literacy as an object that could be passed from teacher to student and that was often missing hidden or buried in urban settings. Implications of the study suggest that faculty members are one factor among several important influences in preservice teachers becoming professionals and the metaphors faculty use in teaching preservice teachers deserve careful consideration.
Extending the Conversation: Contemplating Trust in Times of Uncertainty: Uniting Practice and Interactional Awareness to Address Ethical Dilemmas in English Teacher Education
The authors address the age-old problem of theory and practice in the perceptions of English preservice teachers and the teacher educators who wish to best prepare them for school settings.
Opening the Conversation: Taking Stock in Our Final Year of Editorship
The editors look back on their editorship of EE and introduce the current issue.
Opening the Conversation: Meeting Mr. Danza. Or Not.
Editors Rush and Scherff discuss Tony Danza’s book I’d Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had: My Year as a Rookie Teacher at Northeast High and speculate on how his teaching experience may have been different if he had gone through a formal teacher education program.
Who’s the Teacher? What Tony Danza Taught Us about English Education
This study examines the reality TV series Teach: Tony Danza and argues for its value as a teaching tool in the secondary English methods class. Drawing on television studies in particular theories surrounding reality television the authors suggest that their students’ knowledge of the conventions and practices of reality television shows opens up a space for them to focus on the “real but not quite real” representations of Danza’s experiences teaching. His celebrity status creates a distance between him and our preservice teachers that allows them to feel comfortable analyzing and critiquing his often-problematic practices. The authors having used excerpts from this series in methods courses with undergraduate and graduate preservice English teachers find that the series along with its accompanying interactive website provides opportunities for students to interrogate questions of classroom management assessment student teacher relationships and course content.
Extending the Conversation: Reframing Literacy Practices for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students in U.S. Schools
The growing numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse students including English learners in US K–12 settings pose unique challenges and opportunities for English educators. While there have been evolving efforts in policy research and classroom practices to support culturally and linguistically diverse learners' development a broadened understanding of their cultural lives and more global and contextualized perspectives are needed. Building upon a cosmopolitan perspective this article explores the current policies research and practices related to language and literacy education for these students. Promising practices in English education in terms of strategies to promote world Englishes multiliteracy and critical literacy practices are examined. Finally recommendations for the development of policy and research that address a broader sociocultural understanding of culturally and linguistically diverse students and English education are also provided.
Sustaining Narratives of Hope: Literacy, Multimodality, and the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School
This article explores how an English teacher students and administrators at a public high school in Chicago participated in a multimodal writing project that negotiated the space between hope and critique ultimately placing the community at the center of the curriculum. This project aims to illuminate how narrative renderings of possibility—or the lack thereof—construct understandings of reality and how multimodality might be used to help teachers and students share their own visions with one another and with the public. Finally this article suggests ways in which English educators researchers and students might collaborate to create productive spaces wherein disparate narratives can coexist.
Extending the Conversation: Learning to Teach and Critical Pedagogy: Struggling with a “Do as I Say, Not as I Do” Pedagogy
This article is a critical reflection in which I address epistemological and institutional collisions in beliefs and praxis that I’ve experienced as an instructor of English methods courses in Michigan State University’s secondary teacher preparation program.
Opening the Conversation: Reflections on the 2013 NCTE Convention
The editors reflect on the last NCTE Annual Convention and introduce the articles in this issue.
Activist Teacher Education, Foucault, and the Case of Two English Teachers
This article explores Foucault’s counterintuitive views on intellectuals and activism through conceptual arguments teacher inquiry and qualitative data to create space to consider alternative approaches to political action in teacher education. After contrasting CEE’s political action agenda with Foucault’s critical project I outline my early attempts to put Foucault’s ideas to work in a master’s level curriculum course. I then explore the case of two English teachers who attributed their professional renewal and local activism to moments of the course that were influenced by Foucault’s genealogies.
Reclaiming English Education: Rooting Social Justice in Dispositions
This article addresses the importance of foregrounding social justice in teaching and assessing dispositions for preservice teachers in secondary English language arts. We provide a historical overview of dispositions and their politicization and we address NCATE’s removal of social justice and its impending return. We conclude with possibilities for assessing dispositions for social justice and reflections on the implications for accreditation and consider what might be in store for the future of dispositions in English education.
To Witness and to Testify: Preservice Teachers Examine Literary Aesthetics to Better Understand Diverse Literature
Ethnically unfamiliar literature can provide opportunities for teacher candidates to expand their repertoire of available texts to better support students in their care. Howeverethnically unfamiliar literatures can be difficult for readers to understand and appreciate. This article addresses this disconnect by infusing multicultural literature study among preservice teachers with the explicit examination of the literary aesthetic. Attention to literary aesthetics provided participants new literary language for analysis and response the opportunity to apply existing analytical skills in new ways cultural context to inform their analyses and permission to admit deficiencies of knowledge or explore personal struggles.
Extending the Conversation: Learning from Our Youngest Writers: Preservice Teachers in Primary Classes
Authors Roark Mulligan and Kay Dawson describe a project in which preservice teachers worked in primary grade classrooms focusing on mentoring young children in writing. In spite of the authors’ initial fears that preservice teachers would find these experiences irrelevant the authors found that the preservice teachers “witnessed a rapidity of development that could not be observed on any other grade level.”
Opening the Conversation: Teacher Evaluations That Improve Teacher Practice
The editors introduce the content of this issue.
Contradictory and Missing Voices in English Education: An Invitation to English Faculty
This article offers both a rationale and a proposal for the meaningful contribution of English faculty to the preparation of English teachers. We draw on data from teacher licensure tests and interviews with English and English Education faculty to underscore contradictions among the various voices in English education and to identify ways of bringing English faculty more meaningfully into the conversation. While analysis of our quantitative data suggests correlations between Praxis II exams and other measures of candidates’ content knowledge and skills analysis of interview transcripts and course documents reveals clear differences. We conclude with recommendations for involving English faculty in teacher preparation to balance out the contradictory and dominant voices in English education.
Extending the Conversation: Authentic Teacher Evaluation: A Two-Tiered Proposal for Formative and Summative Assessment
Peter Smagorinsky presents a new proposal for teacher evaluation in his article. His suggestion is quite appropriate for our times: “Assessing teachers according to what effective teachers do rather than according to which assessment means are most cost-effective and most amenable to reduction to single scores seems appropriate.”