An increased emphasis on writing standards has led many U.S. states to incorporate on-demand writing assessments into their test-based accountability system. We argue this creates political and pedagogical tensions for teachers to navigate. We discuss how rubric conceptualization (1) is a process wherein a teacher iteratively (co-)constructs meaning from a rubric’s design via classroom instruction; (2) is informed by implicit theories of learning; and (3) often requires a teacher to negotiate the competing pedagogical and political meanings of a rubric. While test-based accountability frameworks promote rubric use that equates learning with student achievement rubric conceptualization is a process where teachers have some agency to resist behaviorist approaches to instruction.

In this article we examine fugitivity and fugitive literacies as they are enacted by transfronterizx youth—young people who cross and experience life on both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States. Through a community-based literacy project located on the border between El Paso Texas USA and Ciudad Juarez Chihuahua Mexico this article focuses on storytelling and multimodal creation what we refer to as multimodal cuentos. Findings illustrate the ways in which Chicanx/Latinx transfronterizx youth exhibit build and sustain their ways of resisting white Western hegemonic definitions of literacy through communication and creativity. We theorize the notion of fugitivity on the border and share potential implications for language and literacy education for Chicanx/Latinx border crossers.

Guest Editors’ Note: The Fugitive Literacies Collective is a constellation of critical scholar-friends of color assembled from the 2016-18 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color (CNV) cohort. The Collective is committed to resisting hegemonic academic norms and mores. Our members think study write and publish together in an intentional effort to irradiate the knowledges complexities and tensions that percolate when possibilities for the real or fictive liberation of historically marginalized and dehumanized persons and communities are embraced as desirable and worthwhile purposes for educational research(ers). The Collective seeks to embody and animate humanizing approaches to the intellectual labor of scholarship by enacting collaborations that honor a horizontal approach to the co-construction of knowledges while also highlighting literacies that break from educational practices that are inextricably rooted in anti-black racist and colonialist ideologies. This special issue of English Education features work from a fraction of the collective that theorizes and illustrates fugitive literacies by variously examining ways of knowing and meaning-making practices across multimodalities. The issue opens with an introductory editorial written by CNV cofounder Carol Lee that sets the stage for the ensuing critical conversations. To borrow from the Combahee River Collective this issue is our proclamation to the world that we choose—and are ready for—a lifetime of work as freedom-seeking scholars of liberatory literacies.

This article details a self-study dissecting an interracial group of students’ theories of Blackness in a postsecondary classroom. I begin by conceptualizing fugitive literacy practices as tools with which to awaken and animate education as the practice of liberation from whiteness and anti-Blackness. I then approach multimodal essay composition as one such practice and illuminate its application in a classroom. I show how this practice affirmed students as empowered producers of knowledge. I contend that pedagogues must pivot away from the disruption of whiteness and anti-Blackness as a defined target and turn toward the destruction of both as a desirable goal. I conclude by considering further inquiries that this provocation invites vis-à-vis curriculum and pedagogy in English teacher education.

We explore the ways in which preservice teachers (PSTs) develop a practice in practice (Darling-Hammond 2010) with diverse learners when placed in classrooms with college writing mentor teachers. Analyzing survey data and instances of stated confidence in PSTs’ activity logs we share results that reveal a significant increase in the novice teachers’ perceived ability to teach diverse learners when placed in this context. Results also demonstrate a model of Teacherly Reflective Inquiry Practice (TRIP). These results suggest that placements with college writing instructors acting as mentor teachers can facilitate the development of collective efforts to teach diverse learners.

Many teacher education programs consider reflection to be critical as preservice teachers appropriate tools related to the teaching of writing. The purpose of this research was to explore three preservice teachers’ analysis of written reflections that they composed while taking a writing methods course embedded in two field experience sites. The following research questions guided the study: (1) What themes did preservice teachers identify in their reflective writing? (2) What do their meta-reflections demonstrate about their learning to teach writing? This study provides implications for how preservice teachers can develop into reflective writing practitioners.

Recent decades show increased scholarship in literacy education considering LGBTQ-themed texts and LGBTQ people in English language arts classrooms. Building on studies exploring choice in school-based reading I focus on the experiences of youth navigating their visibility when they interacted with other people about their queer reading choices in the context of required independent reading for their ELA course. I examine how varying configurations of literacy sponsorship affected students’ actions. The findings help illuminate the complex relationships among LGBTQ-inclusive curricula and youth experiences.