What might happen if teachers instruct youth directly about historically situated views of adolescence? This 10-week qualitative study examines what happened when a Black Jamaican English teacher instructed Black and Latino seniors in AP English about adolescence as a construct and guided them to apply this sociocultural lens of youth to texts in English class and to their lives. Using scholarship based in critical youth studies and Butler’s theory of performativity this study shows the effects of giving students access to alternative discourses about adolescence. This study contributes to scholarship focused on centralizing youths’ interests in literature curriculum for the purposes of increased literacy engagement.

How might English educators respond to the increasing need for advocacy associated with climate change and ecological sustainability? As alternatives to these stories of isolation and despair I offer empowerment strategies based in Dr. Joanna Macy’s “The Work that Reconnects” which emerges from her 30 years of environmental advocacy. In contrast with other calls to social and political activism action is the last stage of this four-step spiral approach that includes coming from gratitude honoring our pain for the world seeing with new eyes and going forth.

This article explores the practice-linked identity resources offered to preservice ELA teachers as they moved through a teacher preparation program. Nasir and Cooks’s (2009) concepts of ideational material and relational resources are used as a frame to analyze the way preservice teachers talked about teaching writing at three points during their teacher preparation program. The study concludes that a narrow vision of the teaching of writing persists in the imagination of preservice teachers and in their secondary public school internship placements rendering it difficult for teacher education programs to foster an alternate vision of what a writing teacher is or could be.

Research has demonstrated supportive teachers’ importance in the success and safety of lesbian gay bisexual transgender and queer (LGBTQ) students. However few researchers study the degrees to which sociocultural factors and actors shape teachers’ efforts to build LGBTQ-positive classrooms. This article is part of a larger longitudinal study that examined novice English teachers’ attempts to build LGBTQ teacher ally identities. Participant narratives suggested that school-based cultural norms including understandings of gender and standardized testing heavily informed the ways in which a secondary English teacher was able to be a teacher ally.

Two English teachers who believed that they were like-minded discover during a tumultuous team-teaching experience unexpected differences in their teaching styles. In this narrative provocation the author reconstructs moments of tension in team teaching and the path toward reconciliation leading to a reflection on the complexity of the relationships teachers form with each other and their students. The attempt to cultivate a graceful artful humane imagination emerges as a vital part of both teachers’ professional lives.

This article relies on methods of racial storytelling to provoke the field of English education (and teacher education more generally) to see how race is a white problem. Specifically I tell and make sense of stories from my experiences as a white high school English teacher and English education scholar to wonder about the potential work white people might engage to contribute to better understandings of whiteness and perhaps antiracism. I argue that it is time for white people to worry about how mediating race through people of color affects engagement with race racism and antiracism in the field of English education.

This article critiques a classroom encounter between a Black student Richard and a white student Nick that complicated the white English teacher Mr. Turner’s attempt to facilitate a discussion about racial progress in America. Students positioned their bodies on a continuum between 1 no racial progress since the 1930s and 10 full racial equity. When Richard positioned himself at the low end of the continuum and Nick located himself on the high end a disruption occurred after Mr. Turner moved his body toward Nick while verbally validating Richard’s perspective. I argue that the classroom’s affective register was altered by racial melancholia reopening racial wounds and reproducing whiteness evoking emotions I call “melancholic affects.”

Within this qualitative case study I describe how a fifth-grade teacher in an affluent and culturally homogenous school attempted to “disturb the waters” through teaching global literature. Framed by transactional theories of response and critical language awareness I identify three central pedagogical moves that supported disruptions of students’ assumptions and beliefs: (1) inviting students to share their aesthetic transactions (2) privileging multiple perspectives and genres and (3) calling attention to language choices as a central line of inquiry. I argue that both transactional and critical approaches to literacy and language are necessary in order to move students beyond disinterested and prejudicial responses to global literature and to challenge commonly held beliefs.