This paper examines the civic and literacy practices that emerged through virtual feminista pláticas between Adri, a first-year college student and graduate of a “newcomers” high school, and her former teacher. Amidst a context in which transnational and immigrant youth often struggle to find a sense of belonging in educational and civic spaces, this article reveals the importance of relationships and spaces built on trust, care, and the co-construction of knowledge in which multilingual recently arrived youth can elevate their voices. I draw from transcripts of over seven hours of translingual virtual feminista pláticas. I draw on the concepts of border thinking (Anzaldúa, 2012, 2015; Mignolo, 2000) and futurity literacies from the margins (Cervantes-Soon, 2024) to deepen our understandings of speculative civic literacies (Mirra & Garcia, 2022). Findings reveal how Adri drew upon her border thinking to critically interrogate a deeply unjust global context and to imagine alternative futures for herself and her communities. This work highlights the epistemic ingenuity of transnational youth like Adri and the civic and literacy practices that can emerge through methodologies and pedagogies that recognize that ingenuity.

This article reports the findings of a long-term qualitative study that examines the experiences and perspectives of Native youth re-learning their tribal community’s language. Situated within notions of Indigenous relationality, “identity resources” from the learning sciences, and Indigenous futurisms, findings reveal that, through learning their ancestral language, Native youth: (a) develop a deeper sense of their cultural identity, (b) imagine new linguistic futures and possibilities for their tribal community, and (c) recognize ways they, themselves, can become contributors to the cultural continuance of their tribal community. Set against the backdrop of structural settler colonialism and ongoing apocalypse within what is currently known as the “United States,” this research demonstrates the ways language revitalization operates as an anti-colonial act of rupture to settler colonialism’s ongoing attack on Indigenous Peoples, as well as an Indigenous-centric act of healing and self-determination .

As recent history has shown, an information ecology polluted with fake news, mis/disinformation, and conspiracy theories can breed division, anxiety, and hatred—forces that pose profound challenges to nurturing a civically engaged, democratic citizenry. But is that always the case? The satirical conspiracy movement Birds Aren’t Real offers a curious example of how a faux conspiracy theory—that birds were replaced by avian drones to spy on Americans starting in the 1960s—can counterintuitively create counterpublics that engage in democratic civic action across digital platforms and real life but do so by actively increasing the noise in the system. Guided by Moncada’s theoretical work on vigilantism, this critical content analysis of Birds Aren’t Real describes how Bird Truthers enact vigilante civic literacies, authentic forms of youth-led activism in which literacy practices are deployed outside of and/or against institutional constraints in the service of collective, democratic good. Through this study, the authors suggest that beyond merely integrating Birds Aren’t Real into classroom media literacy lessons, ELA classrooms can become civic-minded counterpublics in their own right—spaces where students’ literacies are mobilized to interrogate institutional power, imagine alternative futures, and engage in novel forms of civic participation.

Drawing from theories of youth speculative civic literacies and freedom dreaming, this article explores how youth imagine the future of education and what roles schools and teachers play in fostering students’ dreaming. In this research study, the three co-authors—a literacy professor, an undergraduate English major, and a graduating high school student/future teacher—engage in intergenerational qualitative data analysis to discover how youth cultivate the capacities and imagination to engage in speculative educational dreaming. Through analysis of student interviews and youth counternarratives, we found that the types of interactions students have with their teachers as well as the availability of authentic opportunities for youth to engage in civic thought and action in schools are instrumental in the shaping of youth imagination and agency. For many students, school is something that is happening to them rather than for them. However, when their ideas and voices are heard within schools, it compels students to think about the world outside of school and their place in it. Conceptualizing student dreaming as acts of discovering and moving toward one’s purpose, we posit that engagement in critical civic praxis and relational encounters in learning environments are instrumental factors in the cultivation of youth agency and capacities for freedom dreaming.

In this article, we explore how multilingual paraprofessional teachers and students broadened the construction of personhood through literacy instruction in an English-medium school located in a Mid-Southern, semi-rural US town. Drawing upon a study that blended practitioner inquiry with an ethnographic approach, we closely examine how the construction personhood in translanguaging read-alouds was broadened beyond dominant models of personhood—as monolingual and as having Eurocentric, middle-class, and adult-sanctioned knowledges. Our findings show how students and teachers constructed broader models of personhood by constructing a model of a multilingual speaker and reader as well as Latine, working-class, and childhood popular culture knowledges as highly valued and exciting attributes of being human. We conclude by discussing what kinds of interactions these moments could foreshadow and the implications of this work for researchers and teachers to understand how both discursive and contextual factors can contribute to broadening conceptions of personhood to provide children and youth with a greater sense of dignity and belonging in their literacy learning.

Research underscores how working-class individuals “disidentify” (Skeggs, 1997) from working-class identities because of the impact of degrading, victim-blaming views of poverty in dominant discourses and in teacher thinking (Gorski, 2016). Contrastingly, a subset of working-class students in this preservice, young adult literature (YAL) course for English language arts (ELA) teachers took up the social class literacy curriculum that featured a sociocultural understanding of social class foregrounding the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of living as classed subjects under capitalism and embraced their working-class identities. Through the vocabulary of the social class literacy curriculum, analysis of social class in two working-class YA texts, and writing and talking about their classed lives, three working-class students utilized the curriculum to mourn working-class identities previously not discussed in public contexts. Findings from the study reinforce the significance of “mirrors” (Bishop, 1990, ix) in textual selections that feature working-class lives in dignified ways, perhaps as opportunities for working-class students to not only see themselves but also to identify their experiences as valid and to mourn losses of cherished identities.

Based on the notion that one’s critical consciousness development is rooted in understanding how the moments and narratives of our collective past construct our realities, this article brings together theories of critical literacy, critical memory, and critical sociohistorical consciousness to offer a literacy framework that can foster students’ radical imagination. By examining data from an ethnographic study of students’ critical consciousness development in a social justice-oriented urban high school, the author examines how a critical sociohistorical literacy approach to teaching classroom literature presents a site for interrogating and disrupting structures of inequity as well as a pathway for young people to cultivate innovative, literary perspectives in pursuit of social change. The framework and examples offered in this work highlight practical approaches for English educators seeking to support critical consciousness development in classrooms as well as the need for youth to develop critical sociohistorical literacies as a component of social activism and future building.

With a view to better preparing teachers to engage in linguistically responsive feedback practices, we examined what 120 preservice secondary English language arts teachers (PSETs) considered to be “useful” and “appropriate” feedback to English learner (EL) writers by analyzing posts to an online database of student writing and teacher feedback. Findings of this qualitative study show that PSETs valued linguistic diversity, shared many core orientations of linguistically responsive teaching, and sought to give ELs holistic writing feedback; however, they ultimately equated useful feedback with error correction. PSETs were highly attuned to EL errors, but they were not able to connect different types of errors to language development and could not determine which errors were appropriate to correct given the student’s proficiency level. Furthermore, PSETs largely ignored ELA content and attributed appropriate EL feedback to teacher bilingualism rather than recognizing the need to learn about ELs’ interests and backgrounds. We suggest equipping PSETs with skills to learn about ELs and leveraging extant PSET attention to grammar with additional knowledge of language development processes. Identifying proficiency-level-appropriate errors could allow PSETs to selectively correct errors and provide space for more substantive feedback on ELA content.

Argumentation, one of the foundational pillars of writing instruction in K–12 schools, is consistently framed in literacy policy, curriculum, and assessment as a crucial skill youth need to participate in democratic deliberation. Yet the normative emphases in argument discourse on individual subjectivity, binary analysis, and competitive social scarcity stifle the development of the solidarity and relationality needed to counter rancorous political discord and to build equitable civic futures. In this conceptual essay, the authors offer a reimagined paradigm and practice of argument that fosters empathetic thinking and mutuality, moving away from the conceptualization of argument as solitary edifice and toward a vision of argument as collective architecture. Drawing upon lessons from global communicative traditions and recent turns in literacy scholarship toward participatory design, multimodality, and critical speculation, the authors provide five guiding principles for the Argument Writing as Architecture (AWA) framework, share vignettes from classroom and community learning spaces to illustrate its utility, and propose strategies for its implementation in K–12 classrooms.

The purpose of this qualitative project is to examine the use of a noticing assignment in one fourth-grade dual language arts classroom. We, the authors, consider the texts most interesting to students and how these texts relate to humanizing and responsive writing pedagogies. Learning to write in K–12 schooling contexts is often dictated by state-sanctioned standardized assessments, creating a space in which writing is equated with the rules of grammar rather than with deeper meaning making, inquiry, or joy. For youth from historically marginalized communities, this lack of joyfulness in writing instruction is particularly evident. In this study, we consider the following research questions: (1) How do students in a fourth-grade language arts course interact with texts that are interesting to them? (2) How might the act of noticing support students’ understandings of their own literacies as valued, worthy, and connected to the spaces and places in which they live and learn? and (3) How do students voice their perceptions and experiences of writing and writing instruction through the noticing project? Data include 16 fourth-grade students’ noticing journals, pre-project surveys of youth feelings toward writing, focal group interviews, and researcher field notes. Findings demonstrated that youth held varied perspectives toward writing, that they engaged in multiple LA skills to notice and respond to their and others’ noticings, and that they engaged in discussions of social (in)justice through their noticings. This study has implications for educators and researchers working toward more humanizing writing pedagogies connected to youths’ lived experiences, interests, desires, and curiosities.

In this study, we examine educators’ orientations to the teaching of “standardized English” (SE)—an idealized form often associated with academic and professional contexts. The perceived status of SE is reinforced by normative standard language ideologies and is often oriented as “correct” and necessary for success in education and employment. SE is also a primary focus in English language arts (ELA) classrooms, with educators often positioned as gatekeepers. In this study, we analyze discussion posts from 91 educators enrolled in an online master’s level sociolinguistics course in which they describe how they would define SE for their students. Through iterative, multi-level qualitative collaborative coding of participants’ discussion posts, we interpret six ideological orientations to SE, ranging from standard language ideology to critical language awareness, with varying degrees of acceptance of linguistic diversity and criticality regarding societal sociolinguistic power relations. Importantly, we discuss the messiness of language ideologies, especially as they pertain to ELA. This study highlights the prevalence of hybrid orientations to SE, indicating that educators’ views on SE are complex and often integrate multiple, sometimes conflicting, language ideologies. We argue for the need for teacher preparation and continuing education programs to address language ideologies, promoting strategies that go beyond respecting linguistic diversity to challenging standard language norms as inroads toward dismantling raciolinguistic and colonial legacies in English language education.

This project is an interdisciplinary endeavor to connect research in the teaching of English with Critical Disability Studies, an intersection that is crucial to disrupting ableism and creating more liberatory schooling and societal contexts that embrace broader notions of human differences. Invoking critical content analysis of five young adult novels that depict characters with Tourette syndrome (TS), we asked, how are various models for understanding “disability” invoked in YA fiction that depicts Tourette syndrome? How do these various models function to reinforce, complicate, or reconstruct in a more progressive way notions about human difference in YA fiction that depicts Tourette syndrome? We focused on one of the many pervasive tropes found within all five novels using the psychodynamic construct of splitting. In particular, we call attention to depictions of TS as embodying an animal—most often a dog—that splits off into the bad/dangerous side, usually subsumed within a character’s “normal self.” This trope can be seen as part of broader, historical discourses that have dehumanized disabled people, constructing them as “other” and subsequently rationalizing exclusionary practices. We advocate for and discuss ways for scholars and educators to continue integrating disability from the margins to the center in literacy research.

Please note that some discussions of domestic, sexual, and racial violence are included in this article. This article explores how teachers and students in a teacher training program constructed precarious moments by engaging with sexual assault literature and pedagogy that centers rape culture and sexual trauma. In this qualitative feminist study, 23 participants took up readings of a sexual trauma text set and responded to pedagogy for teaching such texts with adolescent students in the Canadian K-12 public school system. A focal aim of this project is to think ahead to how teachers in training might cultivate radical communities prepared to address the pervasiveness of sexual assault and the insidiousness of rape culture in the secondary English classroom. As such, the ways in which teacher candidates’ experiences of and witnessing precarious personal safety, as well as how precarious moments impacted their attitudes toward considering this pedagogy in particular, are analyzed.

This article examines how young adults with refugee backgrounds reflect on their names through storytelling. Specifically, it explores the lessons and insights the young adults gain from reflecting on their name stories. The study involved six young adults with refugee backgrounds who participated in a storytelling workshop and subsequent interviews. Using a reflective narrative meaning-making framework, the analysis focused on the participants’ reflections and insights. The findings indicate that storytelling provides a powerful space for these young adults to assert their cultural identities, resist assimilation pressures, and build community. The findings call for the need to center stories of youth whose stories are not often heard and particularly youth with refugee backgrounds whose dominant narratives are usually told by others.

Language arts and literacy curricula around the world have been advocating for the teaching and learning of literature in multiple forms. However, apparently in much of classroom practice, little attention has been given to distinguishing the literary distinctiveness of multiple forms of ostensibly the same story. Developing an appreciation of the distinctive interpretive possibilities of multi-version literary narratives may be facilitated by semiotic analyses that indicate how the deployment of image, paralanguage, and language resources have been designed to orient the audience to particular interpretive options. Understanding how to analyze texts to determine such orientations is a crucial aspect of critical literacy. In this paper, we draw on systemic functional linguistics and its extension to the description of the meaning-making resources of image and paralanguage to focus on how differences in characterization are achieved in three versions of the story of Coraline.

This paper draws on Bakhtins notion of heteroglossia to expand theorizations of community translanguaging. Ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods are used to explore the multiple voices that multilingual elementary students adopted and adapted in their digital, translingual texts. Findings illustrate how children drew from multiple voices, including popular media, family collective memories, the school/teacher, peers, and heritage languages, and how they used those voices to recontextualize ideologies about language, literacy, and schooling and to participate in the social and academic work of the classroom. Implications for emerging theorizations of community translanguaging as well as design of more equitable pedagogical practices for multilingual learners are discussed.

Through narrative inquiry, this study uses the concept of “imagining community” and finding purpose and agency related to selected and ascribed affiliations in order to understand the transnational literacies of two Somali American Muslim girls of refugee background attending high school in a US meatpacking community. With the girls as coauthors paired with two academics, we center the Somali American girls’ experiences in their school and community, illustrating strategic deployments of literacies and various identities to construct a sense of belonging/acceptance in different spaces. We also chronicle their resistance to different forms of discrimination arising from linguistic, cultural, and religious differences through their advocacy for themselves, their peers, and their communities. Ultimately, this study has implications for educators working with immigrant students, and reminds us of the wisdom of listening to students’ own voices.

Digital literacies have been recognized as significant practices for the identity formation of immigrant youth. However, the significance of self-sponsored digital literacies in the identity formation of African immigrant youth requires further scholarly examination. Drawing on racial and postcolonial theories, this study examines the identity constructions of a ten-year-old Nigerian girl through her digital art practices across various art apps. Data are interpreted through narrative analytical frameworks. Findings include that family and school contexts constrained her identity and how she desired to be known; digital literacies, specifically digital art literacies, facilitated her deconstruction of assigned US racial identity categories and construction of her desired identity; and digital literacies, such as coding and YouTube Nollywood videos, facilitated new friendships, familial bonds, and ethnic identity membership. Given the limited focus of existing literature on the agency and determination of African immigrant youth, this study makes visible how digital literacies can function as active mechanisms to deconstruct processes of racialization, rigid racial identity categorizations, and constructions of selfhood.

The immigration of Black people from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to the United States can be described as a phenomenon that is not of recent origin (Konadu-Agyeman, Takyi, & Arthur, 2006). The review of legislative policies at the height of the Civil Rights movement in 1965 and the subsequent abolition of restrictive immigration laws made it possible for immigration from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to occur (Hamilton, 2020; Konadu-Agyeman & Takyi, 2006). Cultural practices, epistemologies, ontologies, semiotic resources, and axiologies have been introduced into these new environments as a result of these waves of Black migration (Amoako, 2006; Benson, 2006; Bryce-Laporte, 1972; Dei 2005; N’Diaye & N’Diaye, 2006; Shaw-Taylor & Tuch, 2007; Watson, 2020). This essay proposes the use of theoretical and conceptual frameworks for understanding such phenomena. Black immigrant youth cultural practices and values are explored through Africana phenomenological theoretical perspectives and Sankofa and Tete wo bi kyere conceptual frameworks. This article highlights the importance of studying the experiences of Black immigrant youth through the use of African frameworks as crucial tools for investigating and understand the experiences of Black immigrant youth.

This paper explores the diasporic tellings of Black African refugee-background youth through a critical Ubuntu literacy framework. The five tenets of a critical Ubuntu literacy state that participants are (a) already participating in community; (b) reflecting on oneself in relation with others; (c) seeing themselves in relation to community; (d) engaging with text in relation to others; and (e) undertaking a communal process and impact. In this one-year qualitative case study, we examined multiple sources of data from and about twelve Black African refugee-background students, ages 14 to 23, from seven different countries. In examining these data, we came to see how Black African youth from refugee backgrounds wrote about their diasporic histories and lived realities that illuminated the five tenets of a critical Ubuntu literacy framework. Through a thematic analysis, we found that renegotiation of individuality and collective identity was fostered through (a) collective resistance to challenge assumptions; (b) individuality within a collective community; and (c) collective identity that transcended borders. This study has insights for how a critical Ubuntu literacy framework can be used with students in community-based spaces. In addition, it has theoretical and methodological implications for how honoring students’ epistemological frameworks can reframe traditional literacy frameworks and research.

African immigrants in the US and across the globe are confronted with issues of language and culture retention, resistance to the loss of the same, and reconstruction of their identities while navigating the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of the host nations. The experiences of one such family are shared through the African Oral Traditional Storytelling Framework developed on the tenets of African oral traditional storytelling techniques, African ideologies, and African worldviews, in which storying is both method and analysis. Through oral stories, poetry, proverbs, and songs, the Opokus invite readers to partake in the fireside chat as they share their lived experiences and the implications those experiences have on their identity conceptualization and that of their children. The shared stories expand scholarly discourse on the social identities of African immigrant families and youths about the global, political, and economic forces that shape their experiences. Finally, it also urges English language arts teachers to engender African-centered writing approaches to acknowledge African peoples’ linguistic ambivalence and the “power” associated with the teaching and learning of English due to colonialism.

This eight-year longitudinal case study follows one high school English teacher from her practicum and student teaching through three subsequent job sites, with one year off due to prohibitive job stress. To study the developmental path of Caitlin, the teacher, we rely on the metaphor of the twisting path, which comes from Vygotsky’s attention to socially mediated concept development. This development is reliant on engagement with obstacles that promote growth and conceptual synthesis, with some obstacles becoming prohibitive and discouraging and with the path proceeding in a serpentine rather than straightforward way. Our principal data source is a series of biannual interviews conducted either in person or via video-conferencing platforms. We trace Caitlin’s developmental path by attending to her encounters with competing perspectives, policies, and practices informing the English curriculum, especially as they were enforced by different stakeholders. These obstacles were at times internal to her own thinking (e.g., the tension between relational, student-centered instruction and the belief that students need guidance to reach their potential), at times local in terms of English department and schoolwide tensions (especially, contentious battles over canonical versus relational and contemporary teaching), and at times from distant sources in the form of community pressures and externally created policies affecting instruction (in particular, imposed standardized teaching and assessment in conflict with instruction predicated on relationships and teacher judgment). These conflicts were virtually nonexistent in the fourth school she taught in, an alternative school where test scores were far less important than establishing supportive relationships with students through which they experienced care and cultivation. This eight-year longitudinal case study contributes to research that investigates how school contexts affect teachers’ persistence and attrition, with attention to which sorts of environments provided obstacles that benefitted Caitlin’s development, and which were prohibitive.

Although research illustrates the benefits of biliteracy, most bilingual students will not have access to a bilingual education program in which they receive official instruction in all their languages. However, the English language arts can become a space where any teacher can support students’ biliteracy through purposeful curricular, instructional, and family engagement choices. This case study of two early childhood educators illustrates specific actions teachers took in their language arts instruction to support home language literacy development, along with English, even with languages they did not speak. Specifically, results illustrate that three key general ideas allowed them to support students’ biliteracy: gathering information about the students and their languages, incorporating the home languages into their classroom, and most notably, developing strong family partnerships for caregivers to play an active role in home language literacy instruction. In this article, we share their specific actions that other ELA educators can take and the response from two students from low-incidence languages: an Arabic-heritage speaker and a newcomer Russian speaker from Ukraine. This study illustrates humanizing, rather than standardizing, language arts instruction that disrupts monolingual norms in order to provide bilingual students (from emergent bilinguals to heritage speakers) a more equitable education.

Drawing on surveys and interviews with college writing instructors and students at a public university in the United States, this mixed methods study revealed that in many cases instructors adopted translingual orientations, whereas students were committed to norms in their views of writing across differences. Students’ orientations to language as stable and discrete revealed the perseverance of monolingualism and standard language ideologies in college writing classrooms. The results established that writing programs should go beyond merely accepting linguistic diversity and incorporate language rights into the curriculum to demonstrate openness to pedagogies of difference. Writing instructors should embrace translingual pedagogies and practices not just to challenge students’ mainstream ideological positions but also to facilitate inclusive learning environments that celebrate linguistic diversity.

Although a growing body of research recognizes the importance of viewing argumentation as a means of understanding rather than combating others, little is known about how teachers cultivate this practice in classroom conversations when teaching argumentation. This study examines how argument can be taught in classroom discourse with an empathizing stance and generates associated pedagogical constructs. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, this study examines the key instructional events in an argumentative writing unit in two high school English language arts classes. The analysis demonstrates that the empathizing stance is introduced in the relationship between arguers and their warrants and the differences existing between arguers. It also generates four pedagogical constructs related to the teaching of argument with the stance: (1) identifying the connection between arguers’ warrants and backgrounds; (2) transposing oneself into others’ backgrounds; (3) exploring interlocutors’ common and divergent grounds; and (4) situating argument in a broader context. It concludes with a discussion of the affordances of teaching argument with an empathizing stance.

Preview this article: On Epistemology in Researching the Teaching and Learning of Literacy, Literature, and the Language Arts, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/58/4/researchintheteachingofenglish584429-1.gif

Preview this article: The 2023 NCTE Presidential Address: The Gift of Telling Our Stories Explains It All, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/58/4/researchintheteachingofenglish584442-1.gif

Recent scholarship has demonstrated the need for criticality toward writing assessments that privilege standard language ideologies and correctness-based approaches. However, teachers continue to experience discrepancies between their intentions and actions, struggling to address both content and form in facilitative, constructive commentary. This study uses the activity theory framework of pedagogical tools, composed of conceptual and practical tools, to analyze through interviews and commented-on papers how two college composition graduate instructors responded to student writing. This study finds that while one teacher held and enacted consistent and congruent pedagogical tools grounded in sociocultural theories of writing development, the other experienced entrenched conflict between competing beliefs about evaluative and process-oriented purposes for teaching writing. These contrastive experiences illustrate how instructors’ development of pedagogical tools is mediated by interactions between their epistemological orientations and language ideologies, reinforcing the need to surface tacit beliefs about Standardized English and academic writing. This study concludes with recommendations for productive intervention in novice composition teachers’ development of response practices.

Children’s literature contains shared meanings that not only reflect societal norms, but also reinstate and reconstitute societal norms. This study used critical content analysis methods grounded in place theory to analyze the textual constructions of rurality in 52 contemporary, middle grade, realistic fiction novels set in US rural places. Findings revealed five salient themes, three of which are discussed in this article: systems work to keep rural people in poverty; rural people have deep connections to place; and rural people have diverse, intersectional identities. While some middle grade books in the sample move toward challenging stereotypes of rural places as monolithic (e.g., White-majority, socially conservative) by including nuanced portrayals of some characters of color, LGBTQ+ characters, and characters with disabilities, others rely on simplistic and otherwise problematic representations, using familiar tropes about rural people that suggest racial and cultural homogeneity privileging Whiteness and making invisible BIPOC in rural communities. Given the powerful impact of stories on identity formation and sensemaking, this study analyzes textual representations of rural people and places in books for middle grade readers.