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English Language Arts/ Teacher Training
Research: “The students are only getting more diverse”: Cultivating Culturally Infused Teaching and Learning with Preservice Teachers in a Professional Learning Community
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.
Research: English Teachers’ Experience of Critical Language Teaching in an Anti-CRT Context
This study examines how English teachers in a politically conservative state integrate principles of Critical Language Awareness into their existing curricula despite a political climate hostile to teaching about social inequity. This project stemmed from concerns expressed by preservice teachers in an English methods class about their ability to enact the critical language teaching methods they were learning because of the political context in the state. Interviews with practicing teachers reveal how teachers incorporate critical language teaching across English courses as disparate as AVID English 9 Journalism and African American Literature. The study provides examples of external pushback against race-related curriculum and the resulting fear teachers carried in their professional and personal lives. It also documents teachers’ persistence in the face of fear. Finally the study raises challenges of teaching about race and language with white students in politically conservative contexts highlighting a need to support teachers doing critical language teaching in these spaces. The findings demonstrate that even under the scrutiny of anti-CRT sentiments teachers can successfully engage critical language awareness.
Invited Reflection: Small Talk about Big Ideas: The Benefits of ELATE Membership
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: What If? Wobbling in the Speculative
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: Uncertainty and Vulnerability: Collaborative Course Redesign to Integrate Disciplinary Concepts and Justice Orientations in Contentious Contexts
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.
Research: “It feels like a safe place”: A (Re)Invitation to the Writer’s Notebook as Humanizing Pedagogy in Preservice Literacy Teacher Education
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.
Research: “I’ve always had the abolitionist spirit in me”: Preservice Teachers of Color and Pedagogies of Abolitionist Praxis
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.
Editorial: Letting Students Lead the Way to Justice
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.
Research: “They’re just not mature enough sometimes”: Teacher Candidates’ Languaging of Students and Criticality
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: “I would get canceled for speaking like this”: Balancing Justice, Compassion, and Freedom in the Antiracist English Methods Classroom
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.
Symposium: Collective Dream for English Education
In this multiauthored piece ELATE members dream about what could be in ELA teacher education offering particular ideas resources theories and activities that could help them realize their dreams.
(Re)Active Praxis: Preparing Preservice Teachers for the Unknown with NCTE Resources
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.
Research: Games to Promote Empathy as a Literacy Practice: A New Teacher’s Playful Practice
Researchers have advocated for the use of games for learning yet few studies focus on games within English teacher education. Even fewer studies examine English Language Arts (ELA) teachers as designers of games. In this article the authors examine a new ELA teacher’s design and implementation of a tabletop card game and explore what this game and its use in a middle school classroom illustrate about the purposes of games in secondary ELA. Data collection occurred across one year and included three semi-structured interviews and game materials. Key findings focus on games as (a) platforms for learning empathy as a literacy practice; (b) texts for story building and interpretive practice; and (c) ways to reimagine classroom learning. We discuss implications for teacher educators and teachers including games in ELA curriculum the use of games to reconceptualize schooling and tensions that can arise when teachers incorporate games in classrooms.
Re(Active) Praxis: Making a Place for Rurality: Toward a More Inclusive Multicultural Teacher Education
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.
Invited Response: Promise and Perils of GenAI in English Education: Reflections from the National Technology Leadership Summit
In this essay three English educators who attended the National Technology Leadership Summit reflect on the benefits of using GenAI in English education while simultaneously considering the perils of its use. After posing many critical questions for consideration they conclude with a call for teacher educators to develop a robust research agenda focused on GenAI in partnership with preservice teachers and students as well as a push to engage in policy advocacy that can inform local and state policies.
Re(Active) Praxis: Navigating NCTE Preparation Standards and Restrictive Legislation in English Education Programs
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.
Research: Solidarity-as-Project: Charting Democratic Co-inquiries in an Asian American Girl and Woman–Centric English Education Community
Informed by AsianCrit sociocultural literacy studies and solidarity scholarship this article examines how an Indian American woman scholar-practitioner and eight Indonesian American girls collectively engaged with civic learning in an out-of-school critical English education space. The researcher offers the construct of solidarity-as-project by tracing examples of how the facilitator and participants crossed boundaries of identity and experience to interdependently learn about and centralize Asian American civic legacies. The researcher also considers the complications of power and diversity in those co-learning processes. The article concludes with recommendations for how English teacher education can orient teacher candidates toward enacting solidarity-as-project alongside Asian American girls and young women.
Re(Active) Praxis: Sub Way, Teach Fresh: How Five Weeks as a High School English Teacher Sharpened My Life as an English Teacher Educator
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.
NCTE Vice Presidential Address: The Work of ELATE
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: Reading Community in a Reading Community: Working toward Social Imagination in English Teacher Education
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.
Symposium: English Education in an Artificial World
Various English educators consider what the advent of “intelligent” technology means for ELA education and the ongoing pursuit of equity and justice.
(Re)Active Praxis: Dominant Discomforts: Reflections on Our Attempts to Queer English Teacher Education
In this essay two English language arts teacher educators reflect on their efforts to live out a queer anti-oppressive pedagogy and explore tensions in navigating emotionality and discomfort.
Research: “So, you’re not homophobic, just racist and hate gay Muslims?”: Reading Queer Difference in Young Adult Literature with LGBTQIA+ Themes
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.
Research: Exploring Trends in a Growing Field: A Content Analysis of Young Adult Literature Scholarly Book Publications 2000–2020
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: The Possibilities of Community-Based Partnerships for English Language Arts Preservice Teacher Education
In this article we reflect on the potential of involving preservice teachers in pedagogical experiences with community-based organizations to cultivate all students’ genius and criticality (Muhammad 2020). Drawing on our (re)active praxis as teacher educators we examine our work with two preservice ELA teachers who planned and taught a critical literacy curriculum at a community-based site. By (re)imagining teacher education beyond traditional university and school classroom walls we consider the possibilities of bridging university-community contexts to develop our own implementation of critical pedagogies.
Research: “I want them to see writing as a joyful thing to do”: Noticing Texts as Equity-Oriented English Education
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.
Research: Understanding English Teachers’ Ideological Becoming in the Work Toward Linguistic Justice
In this article we explore the ideological becoming (Bakhtin 1981) of secondary and college English teachers as they participated in professional learning communities and later codesigned pedagogical innovations that aimed to further develop teachers’ and students’ critical language awareness. Drawing on qualitative data from two design-based research studies our cases demonstrate the impact of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic authoritative discourses as well as diverse internally persuasive discourses on the participating teachers’ ideological becoming. Our cases also illustrate the complicated and contradictory nature of developing critically conscious internally persuasive discourses. The findings suggest the importance of sustained professional learning across a teaching life if we are truly committed to working toward linguistic justice in schools and communities.
(Re)Active Praxis: Theory and Practice in Action as Teacher and Teacher Educator
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.
Research: Learning to Teach Writing by Becoming a Writer: An Examination of Preservice Teachers’ Engagement with the Writing Process
Finding ways to develop preservice teachers (PSTs) as both writers and teachers of writing can be a heavy lift for teacher education programs. This article presents a portion of the data from a larger study undertaken as longitudinal formative design research. Data were gathered from 410 PSTs over a three-year period across four courses in teacher education and English language arts at a private liberal arts university in a southwestern state. Two research questions guided the study: (1) How do preservice teachers engage in practices grounded in process discourse in the context of their teacher education courses?; and (2) How do preservice teachers’ beliefs about their writing self-efficacy change during a semester of engaging in writing with a focus on process discourse? Key findings of the study included PSTs engaging in prewriting activities (e.g. reading researching) but engaging less in writing while preparing to write (e.g. quicklist webs). Furthermore the PSTs utilized peers in revising writing but did not visit those with the most knowledge and skill in supporting writing (e.g. professor writing center). Finally PSTs’ confidence in their writing which was higher at the start of courses than previous research often indicates decreased across their time in the courses.
Research: High Fidelity: Factors Affecting Preservice ELA Teachers’ Commitment to Antiracist Literature Instruction
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.
Research: Teaching While Grieving a Death: Navigating the Complexities of Relational Work, Emotional Labor, and English Language Arts Teaching
English language arts scholarship has suggested literacy classrooms should be inclusive of both teachers’ and students’ grief and loss experiences; however teachers’ grieving experiences remain understudied. This article analyzes seven in-depth interviews in order to understand ELA teachers’ experiences of teaching while grieving a death finding that ELA teachers navigating personal loss perceived particular rules for fulfilling relational work in teaching: hiding certain negative emotions navigating the teacher role and foregrounding students’ learning needs. Creating ELA classrooms inclusive of trauma and loss experiences requires teacher educators to attend to the interplay of teachers’ conceptions of relational work and their experiences and emotions related to loss.
(Re)Active Praxis: What Happens When You Read about Racism?
This reflective essay explores three graduate students’ experiences hosting an antiracist teaching book club with preservice English language arts teachers in the spring of 2021. The book club centered on practical advice for engaging secondary students through antiracist pedagogies while meeting the expectations placed on new teachers. Through reflection the authors found the book club opened a space for critical conversations on their own responsibilities as antiracist educators.
(Re)Active Praxis: Disrupting Segregated Knowledge Flows: Reflections from an Evolving Abolitionist
Amid a time of social protest against systemic racism the author recalls an experience of her own racism as a white literacy researcher and ELA educator. She acknowledges and describes her racism as both a means to redesign teaching practice and an invitation to other ELA educators to allow the discomfort that can come with reflection. Drawing on Bettina Love’s articulation of abolitionist teaching as well as scholars in critical English pedagogy and critical literacies the author focuses on the problem of segregated knowledge flows and shares ways in which she is disrupting this systematic tendency.
Research: Preparation and Practice: Preservice English Teachers’ Experiences in Learning to Facilitate Text-Based Discussions
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.
Research: ELA Teachers and Whiteness: Hesitancy as Barrier to Teacher Agency Development
This study examines ways preservice teachers transfer their developing agentive identities—specifically around race/ism inequity and whiteness—from the teacher education context to secondary English language arts classrooms as well as barriers preventing that transfer. This inquiry utilized qualitative case study methods to conduct in-depth analysis of six ELA preservice teachers’ written reflections class discussions and student-instructor conferences. While the preservice teachers showed evidence of developing “theoretical agency” in the teacher education context they often struggled to maintain their agentive poses within secondary ELA contexts. Their struggles manifest as hesitancy connected to their awareness of and navigation of their own whiteness. Findings suggest preservice teachers need opportunities to interrogate whiteness through curricula and structural inequities and to engage in agency development across a variety of contexts.
(Re)Active Praxis: The Crop of Fall 2020: Rural Anxieties and Preservice Identities
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.
Research: Rurally Motivated? How English Teachers Negotiate Rural Sense of Belonging
English education candidates deserve time and support to consider how school and community coexist and to think deeply about where they want to be English teachers. This study used multiple case study analysis to better understand participants’ negotiation of sense of belonging (SOB) in rural schools and communities across experiences: a rural-intensive practicum course a student teaching semester and/or contracted teaching jobs in rural schools. In looking over time and across experiences this paper builds an understanding of how English teachers develop (or do not develop) rural SOB. Data include written reflections and auto-photography that represent practicum students’ understanding of their placement community and rural English classroom (all names of people and places are pseudonyms). We follow those who accepted rural student teaching placements and/or chose rural schools for their first teaching position adding interviews into our corpus. We describe participants’ interactions with space curriculum and people as they negotiate a rural SOB. We offer insight into what English teachers foreground and where they experience tensions as they position themselves (and others) in rural schools and communities.
Research: “Communities of Discomfort”: Empowering LGBTQ+ Ally Work in a Southeastern Rural Community
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: Valuing Linguistic Diversity: Transforming the Teaching of Grammar for Rural Preservice Secondary English Teachers
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.
Research: Reading The Serpent King to Connect to Students’ Lives and Experiences in Rural Contexts
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.
Research: Archival Encounters via Podcasts: Diversity and Voice in Practice
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.
Research: Connections Matter: Building Engagement in Online Learning Spaces
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: Navigating the Hyphens in Teacher Education during the Pandemic: Three English Educators Reflect
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.
Research: “Can Someone Please Say Something?”: Avoiding Chaos in a Virtual Environment
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: Humanizing Online English Teacher Education through Critical Digital Pedagogy
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: Setting the Standard in Antiracist/Antibias Instruction in English Language Arts and Teacher Education
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.
Research: “Writing is so much more than just writing in English”: Teacher Candidates Taking Up Translanguaging in a Teacher-as-Writer Experience
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: A Year’s Long Journey into the 2021 English Language Arts Teacher Preparation 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).
Research: An Interconnected Framework for Assessment of Digital Multimodal Composition
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.
Research: Affective Reader Response: Using Ordinary Affects to Repair Literacy Normativities in ELA and English Education
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.
Research: Navigating Characters, Coursework, and Curriculum: Preservice Teachers Reading Young Adult Literature Featuring Disability
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).
(Re)Active Praxis: Inside a surreal black studio, my students and I, we dance
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.
Research: “Peeling off the Mask”: Challenges and Supports for Enacting Critical Pedagogy in Student Teaching
In this article we examine a teacher candidate’s beliefs teaching practices and challenges to and supports for critical pedagogy during student teaching at an urban middle school. We also consider whether involvement in an ELA methods course influenced the teacher candidate’s beliefs and/or teaching practices particularly regarding writing. Through this inquiry we identify ways to better support teacher candidates in learning and enacting critical pedagogy in English language arts.
(Re)Active Praxis: What’s in a Name? Language, Identity, and Power in English Education
This article discusses activities and actions for English language arts (ELA) educators to engage in antiracist praxis and humanizing pedagogy through unpacking the common activity of classroom name introductions. The author highlights how learning students’ names can involve honoring nondominant histories of racially minoritized communities. Implications of this (re)active praxis include the potential to sustain marginalized students in ELA classrooms by promoting broader racial and linguistic justice.
NCTE Position Statement: Beliefs about Methods Courses and Field Experiences in English Education
Originally developed in July 2005 this statement formerly known as What Do We Know and Believe about the Roles of Methods Courses and Field Experiences in English Education? was updated in April 2020 by members of the ELATE Commission on Methods Teaching and Learning.
Research: Viral Loads and Downward Spirals: English, Citizenship, and a Context of Crises
This study examines five novice teachers’ perceptions of their preparation interests and abilities to integrate citizenship education into their secondary English language arts classrooms. The English teachers in this study highlight the difficulty in promoting progressive social justice curricula without first grounding that pursuit in personal and participatory citizenship. Thus as the United States awaits its return to normalcy after COVID-19 this study considers how English teacher educators may anchor courses in ideas of personal participatory and justice-oriented citizenship.
(Re)Active Praxis: Intentional Praxis
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: When Teachers Hurt: Supporting Preservice Teacher Well-Being
In this essay the author reflects on the importance of accepting and expressing emotion in teachers’ lived experiences. By centering emotion work in preservice teacher praxis teacher educators can make emotion work visible and assign value to it.
Research: Dispositions as a Discursive Process: Using Proleptic Autobiography to Support Teacher Candidate Development
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.
(Re)Active Praxis: Inspired Alchemy: Reconceptualizing Lesson Planning as Creative Work
Lesson planning is frequently presented to teacher candidates through a lesson template but as shown elsewhere in the field of ELA teacher education formulas constrict creativity and inspiration. In this essay I propose that English educators reconceptualize lesson planning as a creative process.
Research: Unsettling the “White Savior” Narrative: Reading Huck Finn through a Critical Race Theory/Critical Whiteness Studies Lens
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: Preparing Preservice English Teachers for Participatory Online Professional Development
Note: This study was supported in part with funds from the Conference on English Education (CEE/ELATE) Research Initiative grant.
Among the expectations placed on English teacher educators is the need to prepare preservice teachers to actively develop as professionals. Teachers are increasingly turning to involvement in participatory online professional development (POPD) opportunities for their own development. Subsequently this article presents research from a qualitative study investigating how selected English teacher educators prepare preservice teachers to engage in POPD activities. Drawing on interview transcripts instructional materials and online artifacts research findings address teacher educators’ instructional goals when facilitating POPD activities and the instructional methods they employed to support preservice teachers’ engagement in POPD activities.