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.

Working in an English education teacher preparation program that emphasizes Muhammad’s (2020 2023) culturally and historically responsive literacy model three graduate teaching assistants sought to understand how teacher candidates (TCs) in the program take up the learning pursuit of criticality in their planning and teaching. In this article the authors discuss findings and implications from a qualitative study examining how four TCs languaged their understandings and enactments of criticality. Findings show that TCs’ definitions of criticality shaped their practice sometimes limiting it based on the compatibility of TCs’ curriculum or priorities with their understandings of criticality. In addition TCs’ deficit-framing of their students was a factor in how TCs explained the ways they did or did not take up criticality in their teaching. Implications from the study suggest a need to attend to the ways TCs language their students and conceive of criticality to support uptake of criticality in TCs’ planning and instructional practices.

In this essay the author reflects on a preservice teacher who disagreed with the antiracist focus of a methods class but refused to express her views in front of her peers suggesting that teacher educators may need to think harder about how to open spaces for divergent viewpoints on the worldview underlying antiracist pedagogy.

In this article the author shares a research assignment used with English language arts preservice teachers in a methods course to prepare them to engage with the NCTE professional community. The author shares how preservice teachers self-selected research topics designed classroom-ready teacher materials based on their research using NCTE journals and shared this research using panel presentations in class.

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.

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.

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.