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.

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.

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.

The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have each cast light on the prevalence of sexual harassment in a variety of media industries. In this piece I reflect on a college YAL seminar in which my students read Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The class discussion quickly became focused on Alexie himself and his surrounding accusations and subsequent admission of sexual misconduct. This piece seeks to catalog our conversation in hopes that as teachers we may come to our own conclusions about silence voice choice and when we can or should ever judge characters in art by the character of the artist.

This essay is an invited response to Noah Asher Golden and Deborah Bieler’s Provocateur Piece in this issue in which they share a loving critique of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). This response highlights and extends Golden and Bieler’s observation about “the strengths of our members: policy practice and dialogue.” The response essay illustrates how NCTE an association for literacy educators could use “policy practice and dialogue” as a framework to drive and connect its work.

In February 2018 teachers and other school personnel in West Virginia went on strike over persistently low salaries and a series of other defunding and deprofessionalizing legislative proposals. Over nine days teachers created signs that argued their cause and showcased their messages on roadsides in their own communities en masse at the state capital and in media outlets across the globe. In this article we describe five themes that emerged from a discourse analysis of 50 protest signs. In response to circulating dismissive and demeaning discourses teachers positioned themselves as professionals content specialists moral authority figures valuable resources and inheritors of cultural legacies.

In this article we describe the promise of professional development for teachers by considering the following questions: (1) What do teachers who work in urban public schools see as the intended purposes of professional development and what do they identify as their needs? (2) Can a move from professional development as absent of what teachers say they need to professional development as publicly engaged scholarship center justice equity and humanization in teaching and learning? To address these questions we analyze qualitative data from preK–12 teachers teacher educators and education support professionals who participated in a professional development initiative in an urban school district in the U.S. Midwest.

Place-based pedagogy the incorporation of local dynamics into the classroom as a step toward bridging the school-community gap is becoming increasingly popular as educating for sustainability gains traction in schools. However little attention has been paid to the role Appalachia has played in creating our modern sense of place-based pedagogy in education writ large and English education in particular. This article explores this role to argue for greater respect for Appalachian literacies throughout the field and a greater incorporation of place-based pedagogy within Appalachian English classrooms today.

While arts-based has received increased attention in recent years as a research methodology rooted in an aesthetic framework less attention has been paid to conceptualizing what arts-based means in the context of particular disciplines of K–12 teaching and learning. This qualitative study recognizes a need to examine sustained and ongoing approaches to the teaching of English through art in an effort to better understand and articulate what art can do for literacy learning. I explore art as story as one way of conceptualizing a central role for art in English class where art serves as a tool for engagement and as the material for ongoing inquiry.

This exploratory study investigates English education professors’ beliefs about the economic value of studying English language arts (ELA). In response to a 44-item cross-sectional survey 140 professors clarified their beliefs about which economic benefits are and should be offered in high school ELA classes; how ELA classes are and should be designed to deliver those benefits; how much curricular attention is and should be given to economic benefits compared to other components of ELA; and whether ELA’s economic benefits should receive more attention in the future. The article identifies patterns in professors’ thinking about the economic payoff of ELA. These patterns are read against five common models of ELA’s economic value. The article concludes with a discussion of what respondents’ answers suggest about competing conceptions of the organization and purposes of ELA and K–12 schools.