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English Language Arts/ Teacher Training
Research: Games to Promote Empathy as a Literacy Practice: A New Teacher’s Playful Practice
Researchers have advocated for the use of games for learning yet few studies focus on games within English teacher education. Even fewer studies examine English Language Arts (ELA) teachers as designers of games. In this article the authors examine a new ELA teacher’s design and implementation of a tabletop card game and explore what this game and its use in a middle school classroom illustrate about the purposes of games in secondary ELA. Data collection occurred across one year and included three semi-structured interviews and game materials. Key findings focus on games as (a) platforms for learning empathy as a literacy practice; (b) texts for story building and interpretive practice; and (c) ways to reimagine classroom learning. We discuss implications for teacher educators and teachers including games in ELA curriculum the use of games to reconceptualize schooling and tensions that can arise when teachers incorporate games in classrooms.
Re(Active) Praxis: Making a Place for Rurality: Toward a More Inclusive Multicultural Teacher Education
This piece recounts how a teacher educator’s experiences as a rural student and teacher at various educational levels have shaped her professional identity. Pairing these experiences with scholarship on rural cultural identity she outlines how ELA teacher educators can honor rural identities cultures and ways of being in their classrooms. The pedagogical moves detailed in this piece offer opportunities for both teacher educators and preservice teachers to consider ways of inviting rural culture into their classroom—to make rural culture part of an inclusive and multicultural way of teaching.
Invited Response: Promise and Perils of GenAI in English Education: Reflections from the National Technology Leadership Summit
In this essay three English educators who attended the National Technology Leadership Summit reflect on the benefits of using GenAI in English education while simultaneously considering the perils of its use. After posing many critical questions for consideration they conclude with a call for teacher educators to develop a robust research agenda focused on GenAI in partnership with preservice teachers and students as well as a push to engage in policy advocacy that can inform local and state policies.
Re(Active) Praxis: Navigating NCTE Preparation Standards and Restrictive Legislation in English Education Programs
In the midst of quickly changing education legislation English education teacher educators must consider how to prepare teacher candidates with a full understanding of new restrictive legislation as they design and implement instruction upholding NCTE’s standards for antiracist/antibias instruction while protecting themselves from school-level discipline and/or state-level legal implications. In this essay a teacher educator reflects on these conflicts in relation to her own practice and how she has made curricular changes to engage her students in this work.
Research: Solidarity-as-Project: Charting Democratic Co-inquiries in an Asian American Girl and Woman–Centric English Education Community
Informed by AsianCrit sociocultural literacy studies and solidarity scholarship this article examines how an Indian American woman scholar-practitioner and eight Indonesian American girls collectively engaged with civic learning in an out-of-school critical English education space. The researcher offers the construct of solidarity-as-project by tracing examples of how the facilitator and participants crossed boundaries of identity and experience to interdependently learn about and centralize Asian American civic legacies. The researcher also considers the complications of power and diversity in those co-learning processes. The article concludes with recommendations for how English teacher education can orient teacher candidates toward enacting solidarity-as-project alongside Asian American girls and young women.
Re(Active) Praxis: Sub Way, Teach Fresh: How Five Weeks as a High School English Teacher Sharpened My Life as an English Teacher Educator
In this essay the author reflects on his experience as a short-term substitute teacher in a high school English classroom. He considers the personal and professional tensions that led him there the impact of his time in the classroom and the potential it offered to identify and navigate the teacher educators’ “radical preferences” that might occasionally need sharpening.
NCTE Vice Presidential Address: The Work of ELATE
This is a lightly edited version of the address given by Tonya B. Perry at the ELATE Summer Conference on July 7 2023 at Georgia State University Atlanta.
(Re)Active Praxis: Reading Community in a Reading Community: Working toward Social Imagination in English Teacher Education
In this essay two English teacher educators detail a two-year inquiry process in which they worked to frame curriculum and instruction in secondary reading methods around the development of social imagination: the ability to engage imaginatively with the perspectives of others and to envision more just ways of being in the world. In the curricular approach detailed here preservice teachers developed social imagination by reading not only the words on the page but also the world around them attending to the ways in which other readers make meaning within their reading community. In this way classroom communities and intellectual partnerships become central to the teaching of reading and literature in English classrooms and serve as starting points for envisioning new ways of being in schools. The authors describe one particular classroom lesson in depth and discuss the connection between reading pedagogy in English and the imagination of more democratic and equitable classroom spaces.
Symposium: English Education in an Artificial World
Various English educators consider what the advent of “intelligent” technology means for ELA education and the ongoing pursuit of equity and justice.
(Re)Active Praxis: Dominant Discomforts: Reflections on Our Attempts to Queer English Teacher Education
In this essay two English language arts teacher educators reflect on their efforts to live out a queer anti-oppressive pedagogy and explore tensions in navigating emotionality and discomfort.
Research: “So, you’re not homophobic, just racist and hate gay Muslims?”: Reading Queer Difference in Young Adult Literature with LGBTQIA+ Themes
Reading moments of classroom talk as text we explored how prospective teachers in a Teaching Diverse Young Adult Literature course read and responded to Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores a text with a Muslim LGBTQIA+ theme. Thinking with queer theory—and its constituent concept homonationalism more specifically—we examined how discourses of difference both liberatory and oppressive were shaped as notions of collective acceptance tolerance and inclusion intersected with interpersonal contradictions and contingencies. Using critical discourse analysis to trace how the “queer Muslim other” was indexed in conversation we highlight the promises and pitfalls of leveraging diverse youth literature as students examined and extended the privilege of personhood through the particulars of a single text.
Research: Exploring Trends in a Growing Field: A Content Analysis of Young Adult Literature Scholarly Book Publications 2000–2020
To understand trends in what seems to be an explosion of books written about young adult literature (YAL) the authors conducted a content analysis of scholarly books published between 2000 and 2020. The question What trends in YAL research and pedagogy do the books published in this span of time reflect? guided this inquiry to support English teacher educators in their engagement with YAL scholarship within and beyond teacher preparation. After examining 191 books with the majority of them focusing on research and theory in YAL findings emerged in five areas: critical events in society shifts in public education literacy movements publishing trends and scholarly community influence.