Recent research and theoretical work on whiteness in teaching highlights reific monolithic discourses that position white teachers as deficient resistant naive and ignorant. I seek to complicate similar reductive portrayals through a two-year case of one high school teacher’s racial identities and subjectivities in and beyond the English classroom. Drawing on post-structural performance theories of identity and subjectivity I pinpoint the material and sociopolitical forces that constrainthe white teaching body and reorient attention to the power of people in daily motion: subverting making themselves known in multiple ways always and already becoming. This performative perspective may provide productive lenses for white teachers in antiracist higher education who support teachers living and working in white skin.

The editors introduce the content of this issue.

This article describes an adolescent’s development of multiliterate and multilingual writing practices and identities. It further explores how a literacy teacher enacted a writing pedagogy of multiliteracies that assisted the youth in building writing practices and identities. Data include interviews of the young woman and her teacher classroom observations and literacy artifacts produced and used by the adolescent. These data are analyzed using theories of identity positioning communities of practice and multiliteracies. Findings include that the youth developed her writing practices and identities over time and across multiple contexts of multiliterate and multilingual practices. Within and across these communities the dimensions of apprenticeship positioning and recruitment of multiliterate and multilingual repertoires were essential to the youth’s development of writing practices and identities. These dimensions were also central to the literacy teacher’s enactment of a writing pedagogy of multiliteracies. The article asserts that attending to the processes through which young people develop their multiliterate and multilingual repertoires and identities can assist educators in creating supportive literacy environments for youth. It offers recommendations for literacy scholars and educators in this regard.

This article extends the conversation on English education as preparation for democratic participation. The author journeys through a cycle of action research analyzing one classroom case study to improve her practice of curricular negotiation in a methods of teaching writing course.

Editors Leslie Rush and Lisa Scherff along with graduate student Christine Maddox Martorana discuss issues related to text selection and introduce the articles in this issue.

Within the field of writing teacher education scholars and practitioners agree that effective writing instructors (at both the P–12 and postsecondary levels) are not simply cognizant of composition pedagogies rhetorical theories and their students’ unique learning needs. Effective writing instructors also regularly participate—themselves—in the practice of writing. As Tom Romano (2007) explains “Those who teach a craft ought to do a craft. When teachers of writing write particularly in the genres they teach they develop their insider knowledge” (p. 171). Realistically many inservice English language arts teachers do not have an extensive amount of time to write reflect on their writing and translate their “insider knowledge” into pedagogical practices. One place where this type of writing-teaching reflection and development may occur however is in the postsecondary classroom. This article describes a graduate-level methods course in which middle-grades and secondary-level ELA teachers completed two projects focused on analyzing composing and teaching an unfamiliar genre. This study extends current research regarding the use of unfamiliar genres to improve students’ writing proficiencies (Bastian 2010; Beckelhimer 2011; Fleischer & Andrew-Vaughan 2006 2009) by adapting these projects to a new group of writers: inservice ELA teachers. Using a qualitative research design this study draws upon Grossman’s (1990) theoretical framework and pedagogical content knowledge to name and define four specific ways in which the course’s unfamiliar genre projects promoted teachers’ “insider knowledge” as writers thus affecting their beliefs and practices for teaching writing.

This case study follows a teacher candidate through her semester of student teaching English in a suburban high school in the U.S. Southeast. The study is part of a line of inquiry that investigates the factors that contribute to teachers’ development of concepts to guide their instruction. In particular this research focuses on the mediational role of settings in teachers’ development of a teaching conception and the attributions made by the teacher candidate to the sources for her understanding of how to teach. Data for the research consist of observations and interviews with focal teacher Anita and key stakeholders. These data were analyzed to identify the pedagogical tools used during student teaching and the sources to which she attributed her learning of them. Findings indicate that Anita’s initial conception of teaching was complicated by competing centers of gravity—that is settings with conflicting notions of effective practice—that pulled her in many different directions thus making her ability to develop a coherent approach to teaching a challenge. The study concludes with a discussion of conventional linear views of concept development and how attention to the settings of learning to teach can help explain the difficulties of learning to teach in cohesive and consistent ways.

The authors consider how preservice teachers and teacher educators might broaden their operating notions of experience and practicality to help one another access a wider range of sources of knowledge for their teaching.

In this editorial we asked two experienced English teachers to provide responses to the two research articles in this issue. In this way all of the pieces in the issue point to the importance of collaboration for different stakeholders in English teacher preparation.

We offer this article to support ELA and other subject-area teachers as they think about why disciplinary literacy teaching is important and how to enact it in robust ways. We argue that it is critical for the improvement of students’ academic literacy development and overall learning that all teachers and literacy researchers attend to the teaching of disciplinary literacy in every subject area.

This qualitative study reveals the ways in which reading and reflecting on two counter-narrative young adult novels fostered opportunities for preservice English teachers to think more acutely about their understandings of race within and beyond the text. Participants expressed feelings of empathy with and connection to characters whose cultural realities are different from their own. This emphasis on the universal human condition and transcendent power of literature suggests the potential of counter-narrative literature to allow participants to connect with characters across lines of difference. In addition participants provided evidence of how the counter-narratives encouraged them to reconsider assumptions that society and they hold and perpetuate relative to people of color. The texts offered readers a new way in which to reconceptualize societal norms to reconsider how they see the seeming “other” and in some cases recognize their own culpability in promoting existing stereotypes. Finally the counter-narrative texts heightened participants’ awareness of Whiteness the ways in which race can privilege or limit by fostering insider or outsider status and the discomfort that can result when such dichotomies define our identities. Findings illuminate the complexities inherent in the development of understandings of race among preservice teachers and reveal a richer understanding of preservice teachers’ development of knowledge related to the educational needs of students of color and their attitudes toward these students in and out of the classroom.

In this article I present six English teachers’ perceptions of the dialogue used by principals and superintendents to communicate policy mandates in their schools. I wanted to learn about the ways in which the discourse employed by these two kinds of policymakers influenced English teachers’ experiences as professionals and how these policies and the language used to convey them influenced the teachers’ autonomy and their instructional decisions. I found that these teachers perceived that policymakers employed an authoritative discourse (Bakhtin 1981 1986a) that made it difficult for them to engage in dialogue with the policy mandates they received. Bowe Ball and Gold (1992) characterized policy as a discourse that functions as “a set of claims about how the world should and might be a matter of the authoritative allocation of values” (p. 370). I foreground the voices of secondary English teachers to generate dialogue focused on reconceptualizing the nature of policy discourse in U.S. schools.

This article examines the outcomes of an eight-month professional development initiative designed to support six Writing Project teachers’ classroom inquiry projects each focused on improving an aspect of student writing. We begin by introducing the genesis of these classroom research projects as well as the structure and content of the support program consisting of seven two-hour sessions between October 2009 and April 2010. Data consisted of observations of these sessions and teacher interviews. We report the successes and challenges of this learning community in supporting teachers’ professional growth. Findings uncover the barriers participants faced while working toward classroom inquiry goals and suggest the importance of community critical structured discussion and active problem solving in developing teachers’ confidence. We close by discussing the implications of this study for professional development in schools.

This article explores how secondary English preservice teachers reason about their future students and the consequences these systems of reasoning have for their thinking about pedagogy and their roles as teachers. By examining these systems of reasoning this article helps to denaturalize normalized discourses about adolescence—discourses that oftentimes help to name and positionyoung people in powerful predictable and problematic ways. Finally this article suggests ways English teacher educators might create spaces for preservice literacy teachers to rethink how their experiences with adolescents are always mediated and produced by discourses that authorize how young people are known and acted upon.

This critical ethnographic study explores how two teacher candidates in English education used specific and varied literacy practices to enact their social justice priorities at a troubled high school in a high-need district. Data include interviews before and after the student teaching experience; observations of teaching blogs journals and emails; and coursework required of candidates. Critical discourse analysis was used to analyze the data. The New Literacy Studies and teaching for social justice frameworks were foundational to this research. In addition the theory of testimonial reading as outlined by Felman (1992) and Boler (1999) was used to demonstrate how the two candidates worked within and against the system to resist deficit models of their students and ultimately bear witness to their students’ experiences.

In Mayher's keynote address from the 2011 CEE Summer Conference at Fordham University he challenges us to rethink what we do and how we do it.

For the final installment of our co-written editorials with former English Education editors and in honor of the centennial anniversary of the National Council of Teachers of English we offer responses by Patricia Lambert Stock Ruth Vinz and David Schaafsma to the question “How can the profession improve the preparation and renewal of all English educators?”

The authors provide a fresh look at the CEE position statement on social justice in English education by articulating how social justice education works in their disparate settings.

In this article service learning is explored as a pedagogical third space from which preservice teachers learn to teach the New English education. We argue that such a space has the potential to foster preservice English teachers’ understanding of their role and identity as future teachers and how this identity is always relative to the students they teach. Drawing from a study of 19 preservice English teachers’ experiences with service learning we discuss three themes relevant to service learning and the preparation of English teachers: (1) service learning as a pedagogical third space for English teachers (2) service learning as fostering the disruption of a teaching mythology and (3) service learning as promoting a recognition of the New English education. Further we propose that service learning can encourage prospective English teachers to complicate notions of teacher/student official/unofficial language singular authority/pluralistic power and server/served.

David Blazar shares his experiences teaching a unit based on the Broadway musical In the Heights as a way of engaging the cultural identity of his students mainly Dominican Americans. He learned much about his students as a result enabling him to connect with them as people but also to encourage their specific needs as students thinkers and writers.

Past editor Fleischer reflects on questions central to the field of English education. The articles is this issue are then introduced.

This longitudinal case study follows one high school English teacher’s path of concept development over a two-year period encompassing her student teaching and first year of full-time teaching both at the same rural school in the southeastern United States. The authors use a sociocultural theoretical framework emerging from the work of Vygotsky to focus on the construction of activity settings and the ways in which settings help to shape concept development. In particular the analysis finds the teacher drawing on apparently inconsistent pedagogical traditions and their associated mediational tools: one centered on a teacher’s authoritarian control of the curriculum and adherence to formal properties of texts and one centered on students’ interests and their agency in learning.

Current editors Leslie Rush and Lisa Scherff talk to past editors Ben Nelms and Michael Moore about ongoing issues in English education.

In this article a group of inservice providers and beginning researchers describe their experiences in learning to conduct evaluation research on a long-term school-university partnership program. We offer the practical lessons we learned in how to undertake such a study and we share the immediate and powerful effects that the process of conducting the research had on the way we envisionand enact our inservice work. As the director of the inservice program noted the problem we were addressing changed from “How can we convince others that we do good work?” to “How canwe make our work better?” This is a question at the heart of professional learning communities.

Teacher-written editorial columns in local newspapers can challenge the broad simplistic conceptions of the profession that have been encouraged by contemporary politics and that obscure the real work of teachers. The publication of such columns written by a diverse group of teachers in the West Texas Writing Project has proved an important tool for fostering a stronger sense of professionalism in individual teachers and for promoting their expertise to the lay public and other educators in their community. It has also afforded teachers new models and tools for teaching writing to their own students. This article argues that English education faculty and teacher educators are uniquely qualified to help teachers develop their political voices and write about education issues for the public and it provides readers with methodologies for preparing teachers to do so. In addition an analysis of four teacher-written columns sets out specific roles teachers can envision and assume in advocating for school reform and in taking greater ownership over their work. For teachers such as these an enhanced professionalism that comes from writing for the public about their education objectives is an important step in developing teacher leadership skills.

In this classroom research piece Groenke explains how she uses an equity audit with her preservice teachers to generate ideas for action research studies they later complete.

Shadiow tells of an event that shifted her perspective on teaching methods courses and repositioned her teaching to focus on student learning.

The new editors introduce themselves and the current issue.

English teachers and educators of English teachers should work within rather than against the tensions present in their classrooms. For us nothing could be more key. Until university teacher educators construct and enact classrooms that embrace the dialogical tensions and possibilities within those settings new and veteran teachers in the profession will have few if any sustained experiences upon which to base their own dialogical classrooms. Moreover to either deny that tensions exist or to struggle to eradicate them is to misunderstand the purpose and possibility of tension. Learners caught between stabilizing and destabilizing tensions enter a state of wobble one that asks them to pay attention to the issues at hand and to author a response. The goal is not to remove oneself from that tension but instead to enter into a dialogue that like the cables on a suspension bridge uses tension for support and equilibrium.

Calls now abound in a range of literatures “philosophy education sociology anthropology media studies;” to reimagine citizenship and identity in ways befitting a global age. A concept predominant in many such calls is the ancient idea of cosmopolitanism. Refashioned now to serve as a compass in a world that is at once radically interconnected and increasingly divided a cosmopolitan point of view remains resiliently hopeful asserting that people can both uphold local commitments and take into consideration larger arenas of concern. This article animates theorizing about cultural citizenship identity formation and communication with an examination of what might be considered sites for cosmopolitan practice’ an online international social network and offline local programs designed to engage youth in representing themselves and interacting with the representations of others. Specifically we report our initial research with a group of teenage girls in India tracing their participation online and offline and their cosmopolitan imaginings of self and other. We hope that this work with young people worlds away geographically culturally and ideologically will speak to English educators in the United States who feel likewise compelled to support their students in developing twenty-first-century literacies’ both the technological competencies and the values knowledge and dispositions’needed to participate confidently and critically as citizens of local and global worlds.

This case reflects a yearlong project I as the instructor of an Advanced Methods course conducted with my students to help them plan and implement critical literacy units in their high school and middle school student teaching placements. To do so I assigned student teachers to explore notions of critical literacy (including resistant reading marginalized perspectives and social action projects) and then use these methods to create and teach critical literacy units over two semesters. Students then uploaded these units along with their reflections to electronic portfolios. This research explores how these student teachers defined critical literacy for themselves and then planned implemented and reflected on their units.

Paris examines texts worn on objects (like clothing or backpacks) delivered over electronic media and rapped by youth emcees at a multiethnic high school. He argues that these are identity texts used by young people to express ethnic and linguistic differences.

This issue’s guest editor offers thoughts on the changing linguistic spaces of society by attempting to map the pluralistic dynamic and fluid nature of new English(es) as used by urban youth.

Guest editor David Kirkland introduces this themed issue on linguistic pluralism which grew out of a set of conversations initiated by the 2006’2008 NCTE Cultivating New Voices Fellows.

Delane Bender-Slack takes on the important subject of teaching for social justice. Her article’s strength is in its uncompromising look at complex often misinterpreted teaching challenges. This article focuses on actual teachers working for social justice in their classrooms. Working from a strongtheoretical framework she pushes us in new directions to understand the growing complexities in teaching for social justice.

This article examines the construction of an intercultural critical literacy practice in a Web-based discussion forum as one way to globalize interpretive practices within the English classroom.; English education students in the United States and Sweden discussed a short story over a period of three weeks.; The analysis of the students’ postings identified five patterns of an intercultural critical literacy practice in which global readers identify and critique the cultural values and beliefs they use to interpret texts and understand their own lives.; Knowledge of the characteristics of an intercultural critical literacy practice can assist English educators in the construction of similar global interactions and critical practices with their students.