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.

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.

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.

Various English educators consider what the advent of “intelligent” technology means for ELA education and the ongoing pursuit of equity and justice.

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.

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.

In this article I consider how pre- and inservice educators notice texts they enjoy in their daily lived experiences and how this positioning may support an attention to equity-oriented English education. I focus on texts that educators working in professional roles ranging from literacy coaches to elementary and secondary ELA teachers to administrators notice in their daily experiences. Drawing on a curricular assignment in a writing pedagogy course I consider how educators relate the texts they find interesting to their own understanding of equity-oriented writing instruction. I examine for how teachers consider the texts of their lives and how such attentiveness might help them build humanizing equity-oriented curriculum with and for students. I also seek to disrupt the overwhelming emphasis on writing as what is needed to pass a standardized assessment. This alignment toward enjoyment may support English educators as they in turn support and view students and their languages and literacies as worthy and brilliant.

A year before leaving his high school English classroom to start a PhD program in English education the author conducted an action research project on student camera use in online synchronous classes. In this essay the author reflects on that project from his new vantage point as a first-year graduate student and teacher educator in training sharing insights into and implications for the power of a theory for making and remaking meaning.

As the U.S. grapples with a racial reckoning teacher educators need to know what education programs can do to send preservice teachers into the field committed to engage in antiracist teaching and confident that they can do it well. This semester-long bi-institutional qualitative study of preservice teachers in two white-dominant methods courses for the preparation of English teachers examines the research question: What factors contribute to preservice teachers’ commitment to teaching about racism in the context of literature study? Defining commitment as a combination of intention and demonstrated ability to enact antiracism in future antiracist teaching through Love’s concept of abolitionist teaching as well as Kant’s conception of a categorical imperative this study identified four factors affecting participants’ commitment to antiracism: 1) knowledge about race and racism; 2) the role of participants’ racial identity in doing antiracist English teaching; 3) experience with antiracist pedagogies; and 4) field-based experiences tied to race. Implications from the study focus on the need to connect teachers’ racial identity understandings to discipline-based teaching; modeling discipline-centered antiracist pedagogies; and helping candidates to racialize field experiences as part of their preparation.

This study explores the experiences of one cohort of secondary English preservice teachers (PSTs) learning to facilitate text-based discussions during a methods course. The authors analyze how the use of a Common Core-aligned instructional text and mixed-reality simulations support PSTs in developing discussion facilitation skills. Implications highlight that teacher educators need to examine their timing of approximations in teacher education programs and explain how simulated environments are intentionally used for PSTs to refine their practice.

This reflective piece draws on the author’s experiences of simultaneously teaching a college-level young adult literature seminar alongside an upper-level methods course on teaching literature in the secondary schools. While this was not his first time teaching the two courses during the same semester what makes this particular experience unique was that he taught both courses face-to-face in the midst of a global pandemic. Additionally his midsized Midwestern university’s largely rural first-generation student population responded to the complex chaos of 2020 in culturally specific and pedagogically profound ways.

Discussions of rural education are often deficit-laden and the ways that scholars discuss rural schools relative to LGBTQ+ issues position these communities and their schooling as toxic and dangerous for queer students—particularly in the rural Southeast. However the tightly knit connections within rural communities afford unique and important opportunities to build classrooms that empower LGBTQ+ students and teacher allies. Informed by Britzman’s queer pedagogy (1998) and Ahmed’s (2014) discussions of comfort and discomfort this article examines a high school English teacher’s experiences during student teaching and the first two years of inservice teaching in rural communities in the Southeastern United States. This research emphasizes discomfort/disruption as productive and positive in creating a community of discomfort that draws on connections to rural communities while working within school-based restrictions to support LGBTQ+ students and issues.

This essay examines how I reconfigured a required applied grammar course taken by preservice teachers at the university where I teach. Because a significant number of the preservice teachers I work with come from and will teach in rural areas in the southern Appalachian region the course redesign aimed to increase their confidence in their own language abilities and prepare them for the linguistic diversity they will find in their future classrooms. Drawing on research by linguists especially Black English scholars and using a combination of systemic functional linguistics and linguistic pragmatics I explore how and why I transformed a traditionally taught grammar course to one that values linguistic plurality.

This article documents the yearlong inquiry of a high school English teacher in New York City who participated in a networked professional learning community (PLC) of English educators exploring the question “How do we engage students in remote and hybrid learning situations in the current sociopolitical context?” Forced to teach remotely the teacher focused on building connections among her students using their feedback as a primary tool to design and improve responsive instruction. Through participation in the PLC and feedback from her students the teacher learned important lessons from others with others on behalf of her students and about her own processes of learning and thinking. This teacher’s journey offers several lessons for teacher education grounded in the influences of ecology and affective interactions on student engagement.

In this essay three teacher educators explore their individual pandemic-imposed online “zippered borders” (Fine 1994 p. 71). Their reflections on navigating the challenges that the past two years created for them and their students resulted in a deeper understanding of the hyphens of teaching various literacy and English language arts methods courses in a virtual setting. The authors’ respective journeys and collaborative sense-making of their commonalities provide critical insights and perhaps some inspiration for others to reflect and consider how our best efforts as teacher educators are still always in the hyphens.

In this essay Christian Z. Goering shares his reaction to the new NCTE Standards for the Initial Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts 7–12 (Initial Licensure) as co-chair of the 2019–2021 NCTE Steering Committee for the ELA 7–12 Preparation Standards past chair of ELATE and current teacher educator. Believing that these standards have the ability to challenge and change what it means to teach ELA he considers how students faculty and the field can take up and embrace antiracist/antibias instruction. Editor’s note: Goering originally contributed this piece in October 2020 then revised it in October 2021 in preparation for the official release of the new standards.

In this article the three co-chairs of the 2019–2021 Steering Committee for the English Language Arts (ELA) 7–12 Preparation Standards share the history development and meaning of the recently adopted 2021 NCTE Standards for the Initial Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts 7–12 (Initial Licensure).

Drawing from the Beliefs for Integrating Technology into the English Language Arts Classroom as well as prior scholarship on digitally mediated communication rhetorical studies and composition assessment and digital literacies this theoretical article presents a framework for creating and assessing digital multimodal compositions. The Interconnected Framework for Assessment of Digital Multimodal Composition conceptualizes digital multimodal composing through three interconnected and layered domains: audience mode and meaning and originality. Though the three domains are defined individually they are inextricably linked within the recursive processes and products of digital multimodal composing to contribute to intended meaning. The authors describe and justify the domains present assessment considerations and conclude with implications for practice and suggestions for designing assessments relevant to context and task.

Literacy normativities reinforce the colonial racist and anti-queer underpinnings of English education and today these normativities are propelled by the English teacher imagination. To render these normativities visible this study traces the affective reader responses of an inquiry community of queer educators and reveals normative reading practices that animate how English teachers imagine and feel their classroom worlds. In particular ordinary affects—those that are subtly felt and often overlooked—spotlight interpretive norms and normative feelings that hide the field’s ongoing commitments to colonization racism queerphobia and more. Contributing to Critical English Education (CEE) this article concludes by calling for multiple prisms of interpretation to dismantle literacy normativities in English education and ELA.

In this qualitative study the authors explore how preservice teachers select read and imagine teaching representations of disability in young adult literature. Adding disability to the list of diversity categories can be problematic in that thinking about disability as a singular identity group ignores abling or disabling contexts and diversity within disability (Davis 2011; Watson 2002). However findings indicate that preservice teachers may only see disability in the context of special education if representations of disability are not explicitly applied in English coursework using a disability studies lens (Dunn 2014).

In this lyrical reflective essay in four parts I ruminate on teaching as poetics the teaching of contemporary poetry the teaching of histories of settler colonialism and antiblackness inherent in curriculum design and teaching as adoration. I practice teaching to learn how to move with and love my students to encourage them to move with and love their future students. I then reflect on my practice after and in between meditation so the poetics here is an invitation to meditation.

Multiple ELA teacher educators share assignments created for their ELA methods courses that intentionally connect to the development of critical agentic active ethical reflective and socially just ELA teachers a specific objective of methods coursework addressed in the ELATE position statement Beliefs about Methods Courses and Field Experiences in English Education.

This article examines the need to implement practical methods for helping teacher candidates in English language arts develop effective dispositions. The author suggests that candidates compose proleptic autobiographies—a form of discourse that describes an envisioned future as if it has occurred in the past—as a way to articulate the professional identities and dispositions to which they aspire. Citing examples from proleptic autobiographies composed by preservice teachers the author discusses emergent dispositions and the benefits they may yield including increased pedagogical creativity enhanced knowledge and skills and greater retention among early-career teachers.

This case study which investigates twenty-four 11th-grade students of American literature asks: What successes and challenges did students experience when reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through a critical race theory (CRT)/critical Whiteness studies (CWS) lens? Findings reveal that applying a CRT/CWS lens helped students understand and identify CRT/CWT tenets while reading the novel and extrapolate these tenets to their social worlds. However 42 percent of students resisted the unit by using the White Talk discourse strategy of wishing they could “just read the book”; other students demonstrated White rage. The study offers several implications for ELA teacher education.

Research shows that preservice English teachers (PSETs) lack opportunities to respond to student writing and that they may view student writing through a deficit lens. To address this need the authors developed the Writing Mentors (WM) program a digital field placement that gave PSETs experience providing feedback to high school writers. In this analysis we examine how PSETs’ views of response were shaped by their digital interactions with high school writers. The challenges of interacting asynchronously created opportunities for PSETs to identify limitations in the mode of communication propose approaches to providing feedback and reflect on how teacher feedback can nurture or constrain relationships with students. These findings point to the promise of critical reflection on the disruptive potential of digital feedback for supporting PSTs’ response to student writing.

Sex (sexual acts) and sexuality (sexual orientation and gender identity) have become common topics in the news and public discourse. Although sex and sexuality influence adolescents’ experiences with school and schooling conversely shapes youth sexualities research shows that schools do little to help adolescents make sense of their developing sexual identities. We believe that ELA classrooms are a natural fit for addressing this shortfall. Using the journey of one ELA teacher we illustrate the ways that issues of sex and sexuality influenced and shaped students’ and their teacher’s classroom experiences. We seek to encourage ELA teachers to rethink the implications of sidestepping issues of sex and sexuality in their classrooms.

This study explores a practice-based approach to learning to facilitate dialogically oriented textbased discussions. Through an exploration of rehearsals of discussion facilitation in a summer professional development program we identify two types of framing for coaching moments: ones that attend to generalities of discussion and ones that attend to novelty in discussion. We find that attention to generalities helps develop teachers’ efficiency in facilitation while attention to novelty helps develop an ability to innovate in response to students’ contributions. We consider how English teacher educators might balance a focus on efficiency with a focus on innovation in light of the value of adaptive expertise supporting teachers’ implementation of dialogic discussions.