In this article the authors describe a qualitative case study of one secondary teacher and her ninth-grade students in the rural Northwest reading Jeff Zentner’s novel The Serpent King. This work is situated in the recently developed theory of Critical Rural English Pedagogy which highlights the import of devoting attention to the unique aspects of rural life as well as having students critique and analyze related representations. Researchers collected the focal teachers’ lesson plans activities handouts and student work and observed class discussion seminars once per week. They also conducted three semi-structured interviews with the teacher and engaged in weekly informal conversations with her. Through open and thematic coding they discerned how the teacher constructed a culturally affirming and rich unit that honored her students’ lives and allowed them a space for validation and storytelling. Implications for pre- and inservice teachers are shared including this illustration as a model for Critical Rural English Pedagogy a group often missing from this scholarship.

This study reveals the affordances and limitations of introducing a new instructional framework—archival-based pedagogy—into a digital literacies course for English language arts educators in the fall of 2020 in the midst of COVID-19. Its purpose was to document how seven students in the course went about choosing archival content for the podcasts they created as part of their final project. The conceptual framework of artifactual critical literacy guided the study’s methodology analysis and interpretation of the participants’ descriptions of how the archival artifacts they selected became centerpieces in their podcasts and reflected their personal and/or professional identities. Findings from the study are presented through the seven participants’ narrative reflections created during the spring of 2021. Implications are discussed for furthering archival-based pedagogy as a curricular alternative to traditional online teaching and learning.

This study investigated the experiences of preservice secondary English language arts (ELA) teacher candidates (n=12) as they attempted to complete their crucial student teaching field experience during the 2020–2021 pandemic crises. In addition it looked at their university supervisors’ (n=3) experiences as they sought to mentor and guide the teacher candidates through a virtual environment. Findings indicated both positive and negative consequences for participants. Overall the student teachers and university supervisors remained optimistic about the internship experience and found value in it. Yet the complexities of schedules digital platforms and expectations took a heavy toll with one student dropping out and another deciding to go to law school after finishing their education degree. Implications for supporting student teachers and mentors in virtual environments are included along with recommendations for future research on promoting the cultivation of digital pedagogy in ELA preservice coursework.

As English teacher educators who research and experiment with digital literacies in the classroom we felt prepared for many of the pedagogical and technical aspects of the shift to emergency remote teaching. However the realities of teaching and learning in a society under widespread long-term stress illuminated the necessity of addressing the social and emotional toll of the pandemic in our teaching as well.

Teacher-as-writer experiences in which teacher candidates engage deeply in their own writing and consider its implications for their pedagogies are common features of writing methods courses. However most existing research on these assignments has focused on the experiences of educators who write and will teach exclusively in English. We explore the experiences of bilingual teacher candidates who engaged in a teacher-as-writer assignment in our writing methods course which we redesigned through the lens of translanguaging pedagogies (García et al. 2016). Drawing on theories of translanguaging (García 2009) and raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa 2015) we describe how two teacher candidates experienced invitations to compose across languages in ways that were simultaneously empowering and complicated. Ultimately through this article we seek to bring needed recognition of linguistic and racial diversity to discussions of teacher-as-writer experiences and to highlight the pedagogical potential of translanguaging in writing teacher education.