This reflective essay explores three graduate students’ experiences hosting an antiracist teaching book club with preservice English language arts teachers in the spring of 2021. The book club centered on practical advice for engaging secondary students through antiracist pedagogies while meeting the expectations placed on new teachers. Through reflection the authors found the book club opened a space for critical conversations on their own responsibilities as antiracist educators.

Amid a time of social protest against systemic racism the author recalls an experience of her own racism as a white literacy researcher and ELA educator. She acknowledges and describes her racism as both a means to redesign teaching practice and an invitation to other ELA educators to allow the discomfort that can come with reflection. Drawing on Bettina Love’s articulation of abolitionist teaching as well as scholars in critical English pedagogy and critical literacies the author focuses on the problem of segregated knowledge flows and shares ways in which she is disrupting this systematic tendency.

This study examines ways preservice teachers transfer their developing agentive identities—specifically around race/ism inequity and whiteness—from the teacher education context to secondary English language arts classrooms as well as barriers preventing that transfer. This inquiry utilized qualitative case study methods to conduct in-depth analysis of six ELA preservice teachers’ written reflections class discussions and student-instructor conferences. While the preservice teachers showed evidence of developing “theoretical agency” in the teacher education context they often struggled to maintain their agentive poses within secondary ELA contexts. Their struggles manifest as hesitancy connected to their awareness of and navigation of their own whiteness. Findings suggest preservice teachers need opportunities to interrogate whiteness through curricula and structural inequities and to engage in agency development across a variety of contexts.

Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies affect theory and critical literacy this article explores comics made by three eighth-grade students in response to Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus. Students’ comics were developed through participatory research alongside their classroom teacher a research team and teacher candidates from a local university. These three students Stella Maisie and Naomi reacted strongly to the content of Maus and the comics medium and raised questions around identity representation and the legibility of their often-intense emotional responses. We trace their affective engagements to explore how comic-making allowed students to represent feelings that are often difficult to make visible in school spaces. Our analysis highlights how affective critical literacy orients teaching and research toward working-through rather than resolving complicated emotions allowing educators to recognize unanswered questions as forms of critical engagement.

We describe the work of two groups of middle school youth as they authored stories set in their community based on superhero and absurdist storytelling genres. Their storytelling was part of a weekly ELA project that took place from February through May 2017 in a public middle school in a neighborhood where economic inequality defines many facets of everyday life. Drawing on audio and video recordings from ten weekly storytelling events field notes interviews and close readings of youth narratives we describe how youth created and initiated proleptic bids and thereby opened proleptic gaps for improvising on and producing new material with the potential to rescript the meanings of childhood and equity in their communities. We argue that these bids and gaps made space for youth to not only critique but also move beyond dominant readings of their neighborhood and we suggest that such openings are therefore necessary for transformative literacy pedagogy and practice. We further argue that proleptic pedagogy in the form of joint storytelling affords a compelling and sustainable space for youth to experience joy friendship and artist-authoring identities all of which have been systematically eroded by federal state and district policies oriented to testing and closed meanings.

English education candidates deserve time and support to consider how school and community coexist and to think deeply about where they want to be English teachers. This study used multiple case study analysis to better understand participants’ negotiation of sense of belonging (SOB) in rural schools and communities across experiences: a rural-intensive practicum course a student teaching semester and/or contracted teaching jobs in rural schools. In looking over time and across experiences this paper builds an understanding of how English teachers develop (or do not develop) rural SOB. Data include written reflections and auto-photography that represent practicum students’ understanding of their placement community and rural English classroom (all names of people and places are pseudonyms). We follow those who accepted rural student teaching placements and/or chose rural schools for their first teaching position adding interviews into our corpus. We describe participants’ interactions with space curriculum and people as they negotiate a rural SOB. We offer insight into what English teachers foreground and where they experience tensions as they position themselves (and others) in rural schools and communities.