This reflective essay explores the evolution of an educator’s understanding of the inherently political nature of teaching inspired by Paulo Freire’s philosophy and deepened through personal experience and professional development. Initially resistant to integrating politics into pedagogy the author recounts how mentoring new teachers and a pivotal experience with a mentee exposed the inadequacy of apolitical teaching. A Fulbright fellowship further shifted the author’s perspective revealing that classrooms are critical spaces for civic discourse and democratic engagement. Embracing this insight the author began explicitly incorporating political texts and discussions while maintaining a focus on analytical thinking over partisan debate. The essay concludes with a framework for preservice and new teachers to navigate political content thoughtfully and responsibly. It argues that avoiding politics is not a neutral act but rather a missed opportunity to equip students for active citizenship in a complex polarized world.

This article addresses how teacher educators prepare literacy teachers to respond to the politicization of reading and literacy in current contexts. Utilizing a humanizing pedagogies framework the authors explore four nested cases within a case study of one cohort of preservice teachers’ literacy mentoring in a two-semester course-based practicum. They ask how preservice teachers practice humanizing pedagogy and how they reflect toward their future teaching. A qualitative analysis of course artifacts reveals particularities in how participants learn about themselves as they mentor young readers leverage those understandings to build their teaching practice and connect their experiences to the politics of schooling. Participants envision cultivating belonging and critical literacy within their future classrooms conscious of the conditions of schooling and hopeful about their capacity to teach critical literacy. Implications for teacher education include designing spaces to come to know and meet preservice teachers where they are in their journeys toward humanization.

This review of teacher research published in four NCTE journals from 2003–2023 considers who is authoring teacher research articles about which middle and secondary contexts and for which audiences. Despite teacher research’s history in English education epistemic injustice has fragmented its contributions to our field’s knowledge base. Consequently a recent history is critically important to document. Drawing on positioning theory to analyze how article authors position themselves and others through writing for publication this research reveals that most teacher research published in these NCTE journals is authored by English educators. It identifies three vantage points from which English educators differently position themselves in relation to teacher research and teacher-researchers as they contribute to ELA’s emancipatory aims. At a sociopolitical moment when teacher agency and intellectualism are particularly threatened this review calls English educators forward. By capitalizing on our collective power to publish and seek sustainable change with classroom teacher-researchers we champion shared roles as knowledge producers and agents of change working together to emancipate students and one another from oppressive systems of inequities.

Using the metaphor of my grandmother’s garden and her endless pockets of tools this praxis-focused discussion offers practical guidance for educators to effectively and strategically navigate complex political contexts and restrictive mandates. The goal is to equip and empower teachers so that they and students might flourish despite figurative briars and rocky terrains just as my grandmother’s plants did.

In this ELATE position statement issued on November 21 2024 the authors contextualize GenAI as an issue of literacy offering specific considerations for incorporating addressing and exploring this technology in ELA teacher education. More broadly the authors encourage us to question how teacher education can navigate these increasingly complex technologies and the attendant literacies while responding to the political implications of both.

This essay explores an in-class activity designed to prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) to leverage critical literacies as they navigate political social media claims about English/reading instruction in a methods of middle school ELA course. PSTs investigated content produced by social media teacher influencers ascribed to the “Science of Reading” (SOR) movement using Gee’s (2014) “tools of inquiry” for discourse analysis. While PSTs shared greater critical perspectives of social media content after the activity they also struggled to identify the political underpinnings of instructional claims. The author reflects on this activity and offers suggestions for teacher educators as they prepare PSTs for twenty-first-century political and pedagogical influences.

The recent ELATE position statement on generative AI in English education is nuanced and wise perhaps the best that can be produced in this historical moment. However we must fully grasp the dangers of the “efficiency” celebrated by the technological economic and ideological interests driving these tools which have consequences for individual cognition and democratic participation. ELA professionals must champion broad human engagements with language including writing that prizes people’s experiences thoughts imaginations and voices for purposes beyond efficiency.

Teacher educators who are committed to antiracist and anti-oppressive work are faced with challenges when confronted with future teachers who do not share these values. This reflective essay explores the story of a new teacher educator committed to social justice work who must work with a teacher candidate who openly contested discussions of institutional racism gender inclusivity and the “liberal” agenda yet was evaluated by the student teaching assessment form as a proficient teacher.

In this piece the author engages in dialogue with the preceding article “A Collision of Beliefs: Teacher Education in the Time of Trump” by Abby Boehm-Turner to reflect on the importance of criticality and liberatory practices.

In the field of English education views of working-class individuals matter not only in terms of teacher beliefs about their students but also for literature instruction that reflects classed lives in texts like A Raisin in the Sun and The Great Gatsby. Without an explicit critical discourse on social class (Jones & Vagle 2013) dominant views of working-class people remain intact especially in the middle-class institution of schooling (Vagle & Jones 2012). This study examines the effects of implementing a social class literacy (SCL) curriculum featuring classed feelings in a young adult literature course designed for English language arts preservice teachers. Findings show preservice teachers capably applying SCL to literary interpretations and to their lives and how doing so affected their ideas about future teaching.

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) have potential as a collaborative model at facilitating culturally relevant/sustainable (CRS) pedagogical practices with preservice teachers. This article presents the results of a study examining the experiences of preservice English educators in a model PLC aimed at fostering understandings of CRS pedagogies with preservice educators. Monthly virtual PLC sessions were conducted over the course of four months focused on developing an understanding of CRS pedagogies with six preservice educators. Transcripts from PLC sessions and individual interviews were examined through a qualitative case-study analysis to determine themes that emerged from participant experiences. Analysis revealed three themes as central to preservice teachers’ experiences in the model PLC: (1) need for sense of community in the PLC (2) apprehension regarding perceived administrative response and (3) enthusiasm for attempting CRS practices in the classroom. PLCs centered on developing CRS practices with preservice educators may aid English teacher education programs in preparing teachers to educate students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

In this piece three leaders of English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) reflect on their individual experiences with ELATE before collectively exploring the benefits of membership in the professional organization.

I take up a practitioner inquiry stance to examine a wobble I experienced while conducting research with ELA preservice teachers. Drawing on Garcia and O’Donnell-Allen’s Pose Wobble Flow framework (2015) I consider how my research design and pose as a justice-oriented teacher educator led me to wobble when participants agreed on a potentially problematic idea. Resisting and interrogating binaries of right/wrong and good/bad I speculatively (re)imagine the possibilities of my interactions with the ELA PSTs. Sharing these speculative (re)imaginings of wobbles in teacher education can function to deepen and make more flexible our individual poses and make visible just collective educational futures.

This qualitative case study examines preservice teachers’ (PTs) self-selected writer’s notebook (WNB) entries and written reflections in two literacy methods courses. The authors use thematic analysis to consider how the writer’s notebooks supported PTs’ learning to teach multilingual writers while concurrently writing for themselves and navigating contemporary sociopolitical contexts. The authors describe how PTs used their writer’s notebooks to process emotion and identity develop professional stances and build experiential knowledge around multilingual multimodal writer praxis. The authors conclude with suggestions for teacher educators and researchers to expand these practices.

As I write this editorial almost a year has passed since the 2023 ELATE Summer Conference in Atlanta. Yet the connecting presenting socializing and theorizing that occurred at the conference continue to generate important research and practices for the field of English language arts teacher education. This second special issue on the conference theme of “Centering Hope and Organizing for Justice” expands on this theme in exciting ways sharing research that will move education closer to justice. Yet before I highlight the justice-centered work contained in this issue I first want to reflect on the elements of hope and justice from the conference theme and how they are operating in my life scholarship and activism considering these questions: What is giving me hope right now? And how does hope help me organize for justice? I invite you dear reader to consider these questions alongside me.

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.