Finding ways to develop preservice teachers (PSTs) as both writers and teachers of writing can be a heavy lift for teacher education programs. This article presents a portion of the data from a larger study undertaken as longitudinal formative design research. Data were gathered from 410 PSTs over a three-year period across four courses in teacher education and English language arts at a private liberal arts university in a southwestern state. Two research questions guided the study: (1) How do preservice teachers engage in practices grounded in process discourse in the context of their teacher education courses?; and (2) How do preservice teachers’ beliefs about their writing self-efficacy change during a semester of engaging in writing with a focus on process discourse? Key findings of the study included PSTs engaging in prewriting activities (e.g. reading researching) but engaging less in writing while preparing to write (e.g. quicklist webs). Furthermore the PSTs utilized peers in revising writing but did not visit those with the most knowledge and skill in supporting writing (e.g. professor writing center). Finally PSTs’ confidence in their writing which was higher at the start of courses than previous research often indicates decreased across their time in the courses.

English language arts scholarship has suggested literacy classrooms should be inclusive of both teachers’ and students’ grief and loss experiences; however teachers’ grieving experiences remain understudied. This article analyzes seven in-depth interviews in order to understand ELA teachers’ experiences of teaching while grieving a death finding that ELA teachers navigating personal loss perceived particular rules for fulfilling relational work in teaching: hiding certain negative emotions navigating the teacher role and foregrounding students’ learning needs. Creating ELA classrooms inclusive of trauma and loss experiences requires teacher educators to attend to the interplay of teachers’ conceptions of relational work and their experiences and emotions related to loss.

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.