In this piece the author engages in dialogue with the preceding article “Affecting Social Class Literacy: Classed Emotions in Preservice Teachers’ Lives Literature Analysis and Future Teaching” by Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides to consider the manifestation of political ideologies in teacher education.

In the field of English education views of working-class individuals matter not only in terms of teacher beliefs about their students but also for literature instruction that reflects classed lives in texts like A Raisin in the Sun and The Great Gatsby. Without an explicit critical discourse on social class (Jones & Vagle 2013) dominant views of working-class people remain intact especially in the middle-class institution of schooling (Vagle & Jones 2012). This study examines the effects of implementing a social class literacy (SCL) curriculum featuring classed feelings in a young adult literature course designed for English language arts preservice teachers. Findings show preservice teachers capably applying SCL to literary interpretations and to their lives and how doing so affected their ideas about future teaching.

This article explores the affordances of roleplaying games (RPGs) in teacher education contexts for supporting navigation across personal cultural and literary interpretive practices. Coding preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) discussions about their own learning experiences we see how tabletop RPGs designed around existing texts have the potential to support both textual comprehension as well as literary interpretation. RPGs made space for circumventing difficult language and Western cultural knowledge instead foregrounding students’ identities textual connections questions and meaning-making. PSTs described the benefits of a “double experience” in which their own decisions in the roleplaying game structured their understanding of the original text when they were reading and their interpretations of it after the activity. We share teacher learning around design including tensions around staying on script to support comprehension or going “off-script” to support critical literary interpretation. We suggest that RPGs in English education contexts can help teachers see the potential of centering joyful sometimes messy interpretive meaning-making while decentering individual texts and teacher-centric pedagogies.

In this piece the author engages in dialogue with the preceding article “Rime of the Emergent Teachers: Supporting Collaborative Literary Learning through Roleplaying Games” by Karis Jones Sasha Karbachinskiy Jennifer Castillo and Alexandra Salom by considering the inherently political nature of roleplaying games.

This study examines how English teachers in a politically conservative state integrate principles of Critical Language Awareness into their existing curricula despite a political climate hostile to teaching about social inequity. This project stemmed from concerns expressed by preservice teachers in an English methods class about their ability to enact the critical language teaching methods they were learning because of the political context in the state. Interviews with practicing teachers reveal how teachers incorporate critical language teaching across English courses as disparate as AVID English 9 Journalism and African American Literature. The study provides examples of external pushback against race-related curriculum and the resulting fear teachers carried in their professional and personal lives. It also documents teachers’ persistence in the face of fear. Finally the study raises challenges of teaching about race and language with white students in politically conservative contexts highlighting a need to support teachers doing critical language teaching in these spaces. The findings demonstrate that even under the scrutiny of anti-CRT sentiments teachers can successfully engage critical language awareness.

This (Re)Active Praxis essay centers on the collaborative revision of two English language arts teacher education courses—one on literature and drama and the other on writing and language—in a state experiencing aggressive legislation against practices of diversity equity and inclusion that impacts teacher education preparing students to design justice-oriented education. Two objectives framed this collaborative course revision: to deliver critical teacher preparation grounded in cultural relevance and justice orientations and to design courses that integrate and demonstrate conceptual and instructional relationships between reading and writing. The authors share and reflect on their experiences and process of collaboratively revising the courses offering a heuristic derived from their decision-making to increase or improve ways education courses support preservice teachers’ opportunities to learn and teach literacy in culturally responsive justice-oriented classrooms.

This year-long ethnographic study explores how two ELA preservice teachers of color enacted pedagogies of abolitionist praxis—centering teaching and learning to and through an abolitionist praxis of identifying and dismantling surveillance criminalization and punishment—via the areas of curriculum and instruction relational work and organizing and activism. When enacting pedagogies of abolitionist praxis with specific attention to curriculum and instruction three findings were identified. First both teachers purposely and strategically designed their curriculum and instruction to explicitly teach an abolitionist praxis yet they did so via distinct approaches. Next the teachers rooted their curriculum and instruction in a radical Black Indigenous and feminist imaginary to teach about but more importantly teach against carceral practices policies and ideologies. Last both teachers facilitated youth-led action research projects that centered present and future world-building actions. This study provides implications for the education and support of preservice teachers and for K–12 teacher practice.