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.

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.

In this article the authors describe a qualitative case study of one secondary teacher and her ninth-grade students in the rural Northwest reading Jeff Zentner’s novel The Serpent King. This work is situated in the recently developed theory of Critical Rural English Pedagogy which highlights the import of devoting attention to the unique aspects of rural life as well as having students critique and analyze related representations. Researchers collected the focal teachers’ lesson plans activities handouts and student work and observed class discussion seminars once per week. They also conducted three semi-structured interviews with the teacher and engaged in weekly informal conversations with her. Through open and thematic coding they discerned how the teacher constructed a culturally affirming and rich unit that honored her students’ lives and allowed them a space for validation and storytelling. Implications for pre- and inservice teachers are shared including this illustration as a model for Critical Rural English Pedagogy a group often missing from this scholarship.

This study reveals the affordances and limitations of introducing a new instructional framework—archival-based pedagogy—into a digital literacies course for English language arts educators in the fall of 2020 in the midst of COVID-19. Its purpose was to document how seven students in the course went about choosing archival content for the podcasts they created as part of their final project. The conceptual framework of artifactual critical literacy guided the study’s methodology analysis and interpretation of the participants’ descriptions of how the archival artifacts they selected became centerpieces in their podcasts and reflected their personal and/or professional identities. Findings from the study are presented through the seven participants’ narrative reflections created during the spring of 2021. Implications are discussed for furthering archival-based pedagogy as a curricular alternative to traditional online teaching and learning.