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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dignity is an important construct for all students, especially those whose voices and perspectives have been historically relegated to the margins because of their racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities. With recent legislation that stands to further calcify the systemic oppression and racial violence that remains so deeply entrenched in US schools, it is urgent to understand how minoritized students broker dignity—or feelings of self-worth, value, and well-being—while navigating multiple and oftentimes intersectional keloids of dehumanization. Currently, we know very little about how dignity is developed and enacted by students within educational settings, and even less attention is paid to how literacy factors into these engagements. To address this gap, my paper is guided by the following inquiry, explored within the context of a yearlong youth participatory action research class: How do BIPOC, middle school youth leverage critical literacies and epistemologies to negotiate dignity? Data for this paper, which were drawn from a larger, critical ethnographic study, were analyzed using what I name as a literacies of dignity framework that utilized theories of critical literacies (Freire, 1970/2000; Janks, 2013), felt dignity (Gallagher, 2004; Stephens & Kanov, 2017), and youth epistemologies (Filipiak, 2020; Green et al., 2020; Kelly, 2023) to explore how middle school youth examined and critiqued three sites of devaluation: media, schooling, and adult/youth relationships. Findings reveal important ways youth were able to reimagine ways of being together and caring for one another in social, educational, and even global contexts that rendered them disposable, leveraging critical literacy engagements to broker moments of collective intimacy and vulnerability. This, in turn, fueled their sense of dignity, offering important implications for justice-centered literacy education.

The recent speculative turn in literacy, English education, and other ELA-related fields has brought renewed energy for redesigning English teaching and learning through genre awareness. However, extant work on speculative genres of reading, writing, and literary study assumes that ELA teachers are prepared or, more fundamentally, aware of these genres and their unique features. Addressing this gap, this article presents a single intrinsic case of Carlos, a queer man of Color and bilingual elementary teacher, as he cultivated genre awareness through an interactive approach to genre pedagogy through restorying. Based on a rhetorical genre studies approach, Carlos’s case demonstrates how English teachers might expand their genre repertoire to include speculative genres and integrate them into their classrooms. This article concludes by advocating for the integration of speculative literacies into English teacher education, doing so to disrupt normative realities tied to white supremacy and homophobia within the field.

Drawing on a yearlong ethnography I conducted at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the midwestern United States, in this article I analyze a classroom instructional conversation about gender and trans identities in a sophomore humanities (grade 10) course that combined English language arts and social studies. In the conversation, youth constructed temporalities (i.e., relationships among pasts, presents, and futures) that were out of sync with the temporalities sanctioned by the school. In doing so, they drew on ideologies about gender, religion, race, sexuality, and class. Yet different youth offered futures that were incommensurate, particularly because they clashed over whether temporalities were rigid, fixed, and unchangeable or fluid, variable, multiple, and thus open to change. Being out of sync signaled possibilities, but not guarantees, of more just futures and suggested a need for literacy educators and researchers to rethink the roles of (un)certainty, (in)stability, and (non)linearity in classroom instruction with respect to sexual and gender diversity. In making this argument, I integrate queer and trans theorizations of temporality and futurity with adolescent queer literacies scholarship, specifically the concept of literacy performances.

This interview was conducted on February 14, 2023, and is published in the original Spanish in volume 58, issue 1 of Research in the Teaching of English. It was translated into English by Benjamin de Buen. David Poveda is associate professor at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, School of Psychology of the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has been using ethnographic and qualitative methodologies for over two decades to study a wide range of educational and socialization processes of contemporary childhood and youth.

In this study, I draw upon ethnographic methods to explore three multilingual international students’ first-semester linguistic functioning in their college writing classrooms and beyond. Through the lens of superdiversity (), I investigate participants’ experiences beyond their shared membership as Chinese international students and unpack within-group variabilities in relation to their language and literacy backgrounds. The findings indicate that multilingual international students’ varying high school experiences are likely to position them at different acculturative stages for overseas studies; it is crucial to understand their superdiversity beyond the traditional paradigms of supporting “ELLs.” The findings illustrate that superdiversity plays an important role in complicating our understandings of multilingualism and multilingual student support in American higher education. I argue that recognizing and understanding superdiversity is important for both multilingual international students and their teachers. All college educators across the disciplines must go beyond simply acknowledging the existence of superdiversity. Instead, they must explicitly teach it to combat the zero point of English (). This article outlines hands-on pedagogical activities to facilitate new arrivers’ smooth linguistic transition in college and achieve linguistic empowerment by debunking monolinguistic assumptions.

Drawing on critical theories of labor and commodification, this qualitative embedded case study explores how students experience alienation and intimacy in the work of writing for an English language arts class. Analysis of fieldnotes from 30 observations, student writing products, and reflective interviews with focal students and the teacher illuminated the meaningful assemblages where conditions of intimacy permeated instruction. Two practices supported intimacy in working conditions: knowledge about writing built through a collective process of noticing, and open-ended work time characterized by “managed nonmanagement” (, p. 176), or calculated flexibility in rules and expectations. Findings illustrate how a literacy practice might contribute to students’ experience of alienation or intimacy (or both) while writing, depending on conditions of industrialization and commodification. Even as the teacher strove to deindustrialize work, commodification through grades and standardized assessments heightened alienation in the writing environment. The study provides an example of an educational context governed by an industrial system of assessment where local actors (the teacher and students) disrupted alienation by working in smaller scales and more closely with texts.

Set in one of the least privileged neighborhoods of the US Southeast, this research project took a discourse analysis approach to construct a day-in-the-life case study. It illustrates how, during an after school storybook cooking class, a 7-year-old, multilingual, Mexican American girl navigated local linguistic microaggressions and extended microaffirmations to her peers. At the same time, she contested and critiqued societal power imbalances associated with whiteness. This study widens the corpus of scholarship that has primarily examined children’s sociodramatic play and literacy development in preschool settings. It also broadens the body of research that has predominantly focused on students’ linguistic dexterity and metalinguistic awareness in middle and high school contexts.

This bibliography includes abstracts of selected empirical research studies as well as titles of other related studies and books published between June 2013 and May 2014. Abstracts are only written for research studies that employed systematic analysis of phenomena using experimental, qualitative, ethnographic, discourse analysis, literary critical, content analysis, or linguistic analysis methods. Priority is given to research most directly related to the teaching of English language arts. Citations in the "Other Related Research" sections include additional important research studies in the field, position papers from leading organizations, or comprehensive handbooks.

This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction, the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes, interviews, and student writing, this study asks, (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking () and politicized funds of knowledge (), positioned themselves as change agents, and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.

The policing of Black Language is inextricably tied to the policing of Black people and is entrenched in a long history of white Western European colonization. The legacies of white supremacy pervade schooling in its earliest years, yet Black teachers have consistently mounted a counterforce in battling white hegemony. In this article, I feature one such teacher, Raniya, who licensed Black Language in her preK classroom. Based on three months of classroom observations and interviews, this ethnographic case study explores the institutional architecture that affords white supremacist language assessments, particularly through an epistemology of language as an abstracted entity and through its process of curricularization. A raciolinguistic perspective illuminated how the white teachers at Raniya’s school insisted on broadly dehumanizing students of color through a schoolwide policy based on white monolingual standards. Drawing on notion of “vernacular insurrections,” I juxtapose white teachers’ raciolinguistic ideologies with Raniya’s practices. She claimed her classroom as a critical vernacular site through her approach of student language as a practice, and by subverting the normalcy of white hegemony within the schoolwide assessment process. This article calls for a shift in thinking about skills-based, decontextualized approaches as inherently white supremacist, and excavates how such a language approach supports white supremacy to thrive. I discuss the significance of centering the fight against white supremacy in our analysis of literary practices, which elucidates the potency of even small amounts of white dominance in institutional mechanisms as detrimental for Black students. As a field, the stagnation of Black student equity and commitment to white hegemony by white educators and administrators across preK through higher education persists. Though some white educators diverge from hegemonic practices, we must consider who benefits and what is sustained when exceptions are used to overlook and not interrogate the norm. This work contributes to the mounting rationales for racial diversification in the teacher workforce.

Literacy learning is an ideological proposition, one that privileges certain forms of language and those who speak them above others. This qualitative study utilizes critical metaphor analysis () to examine the literacy ideologies at work in a secondary remedial reading class. By analyzing the speech of Mr. Baker, a seasoned remedial reading teacher, and his ninth-grade student Angelica, three dominant metaphors in the corpus are explored: READING CLASS IS A RACE, LEARNING TO READ is a journey, and STUDENTS ARE MACHINES. Findings suggest both the limitations of the metaphors employed by participants as well as the utility of critical metaphor analysis in uncovering the ideological underpinnings of school-based literacy practices.

Drawing on data from a yearlong qualitative study examining how children in a multi-age (6-9 years) classroom utilized technology to write across genres, this article examines the gendered negotiation and discursive uptake of expert in early childhood writing. Zeroing in on genius hour as a “site of engagement,” the author thinks with rhetorical genre studies and mediated discourse analysis to examine how four second-grade writers positioned themselves as “experts” across the nexus of school writing. Findings highlight how expert—both conceptually and in practice—became gendered and was interdiscursively traced through three threads: the relational, the historical, and the distributive. Through analyses of young students writing in situ, this article contributes new understandings to thinking about children’s navigation of genres, not only as rhetorical typifications of academic and disciplinary discourse but as unique social actions of curricular play and gendered uptake.

Informed by Bakhtin's theorization of voice as well as cross-disciplinary studies of scaling, the authors explore how a group of young filmmakers rendered one focal immigrant student's familial history by centering speakers addressing the topic of immigration from multiple levels, thereby connecting multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in their multimodal storytelling to illustrate the costs of dehumanizing policies. In this case study, drawing from classroom observations, student work, and interviews with both students and teachers, the authors also highlight the importance of teacher agency in creating opportunities for refugee-background students to interactively engage in the language arts classroom. Drawing from interviews, observations, and analysis of student writing, the authors construct a detailed case study of how one student writer negotiated her stance toward the discourse of literary analysis based on her own writerly identity as a creative writer, illuminating the importance of critically attending to the ideological implications of teaching discipline-specific writing.

The discourse of literary analysis is dynamic and ideological, shifting as writers navigate conventions and practices to meet their rhetorical purposes in particular contexts. While scholars have engaged ideological analyses of students learning to write literary analysis essays in university contexts, few studies have documented student writers’ experiences of disciplinary enculturation in secondary English language arts classrooms. In this case study, we address this absence by using the concept of stance to examine how the identity of one student—Katarina—informed her interactions with the discourse of literary analysis as it was understood and instantiated by her teacher. In our analysis of essay drafts, field notes, artifacts, and interview transcripts, we found that the convergence of Katarina’s identity as a creative and emotional person and writer with the possibilities for selfhood afforded to her in this context contributed to her stance toward the discourse. We examine points of tension across two of Katarina’s essays that illuminate her ideological struggles as she navigated the discourse of her classroom. Our findings point to the utility of stance as a conceptual tool for researchers and educators to take a critical perspective on students’ writing processes in the context of the ideologically laden, authoritative demands of secondary classrooms.

Student agency is an important construct for all students, especially those marginalized because of their linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, or migratory identities. Refugee-background students may experience marginalization according to many and sometimes all of these factors; agency is thus critical to understanding their negotiation of schooling in general and literacy tasks in particular. While many studies have explored various dimensions of agency, we know little about how agency can be enacted and developed by minoritized students within instructional contexts. This qualitative case study addresses this gap by asking: How do two adolescent refugee-background students display evidence of agency when engaging in literacy tasks? What teacher practices contribute to facilitating or inhibiting student agency? Data sources include classroom observations, student work samples, and interviews with students and teachers. Data analysis was conducted using a combined inductive/deductive approach. Findings reveal three agentive practices through which students engaged in literacy tasks: agentive resistance leading to disaffection, agentive resistance of imposed identities, and interactive negotiated engagement. While the first practice led to disengagement, the latter two led to opportunities for students to agentively reshape dehumanizing narratives of multilingual refugee-background students. Teacher agency in curriculum planning and implementation was essential in guiding students to either engage in or resist literacy tasks. Since the forced displacement that refugee-background and some immigrant students experience is contrary to the concept of self-determination, we argue that engaging them in an agentive manner has the potential to help students reclaim that sense of agency within classrooms and challenge deficit perceptions.

Writing studies scholars have long examined how race- and class-based hierarchies shape teachers’ and students’ experiences of writing in US universities. But universities are also workplaces that profit from a racialized writing economy in which laborers of color () underpin writing production. Drawing from a yearlong qualitative case study that examines the writing practices of university custodial workers, this article addresses the following research questions: What kinds of writing do university custodial workers use and practice? What are the conditions for their writing? And what do these practices and conditions tell us about writing in race- and class-stratified workplaces, including educational institutions? Using critical race (; ; ; ; ; ; ) approaches to literacy sponsorship (), and observations and interviews with university custodians, this article discusses two main findings: (1) labor conditions restrict participants’ writing as a part of race and class hierarchies; and (2) the participants employ writing practices that run under the radar of institutional restrictions to serve their own purposes. This study’s findings have implications for workplace writing scholarship and higher education policy, because they expand definitions of and purposes for workplace writing in institutions of education.

Educators and researchers from a range of fields have devoted their careers to studying how reading develops and how to support students who find reading challenging. Some children struggle specifically with learning to decode print, the central issue in what is referred to as dyslexia.However, research has failed to identify unique characteristics or patterns that set apart students identified as dyslexic from other readers with decoding challenges. Nevertheless, an authoritative discourse that speaks of a definitive definition, a unique set of characteristics, and a specific form of intervention saturates policy and practice around dyslexia, and teacher educators are under increasing pressure to include this state-sanctioned information in their classes. Literacy educators’ experiences teaching reading in schools and preparing literacy professionals can add valuable perspectives to the conversation about dyslexia; however, currently their voices are largely silent in conversations around dyslexia research, policy, and practice. The current research was designed to address this gap through an intensive interview study, in which we employed a Disability Critical Race Studies framework, along with Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse to explore the perspectives, understandings, and experiences of literacy teacher educators regarding dyslexia.

To counter inequitable, hierarchical classroom structures, research in the fields of language and literacy studies often looks to the affordances of online spaces, such as affinity spaces, for learning that is collaborative and knowledge that is distributed; yet, researchers continue to locate theirstudies in virtual spaces, outside classroom walls. This study, situated in a high school writing class, repositions the familiar classroom practice of peer feedback as a way to access affinity space features. Using qualitative case study design and grounded theory analysis, the study reveals that,when supported by an emphasis on social connection, the practice of peer feedback served as a portal for students with a range of writing experience and interest to collaborate and exchange honest feedback, practices indicative of affinity space features. Yet, traditional expectations preserved teacher roles and student roles in ways that prevented the class from more fully accessing the affinity space features of distributed expertise, porous leadership, and role flexibility. Discussion expands the field’s understanding of affinity spaces and their application in physical classrooms by outlining new features, theorizing these classroom spaces, and advocating for a reimagine dvision of peer feedback in ELA classrooms where role reciprocity and flexibility resist traditional,inequitable classroom structures.

Threshold concept theory can identify transformative concepts in disciplinary communities of practice, making it a useful framework pedagogically for scholars of academic literacies. Although researchers have studied how to teach thres hold concepts and how students have taken up theseconcepts in learning to write, few have looked at two aspects that are particularly important for students placed into basic writing: threshold concepts of reading and questions of learning transfer.Taking an epistemological approach to disciplinary literacies, I used case study research to trace the changing reading and writing practices of Bruce, a basic writing and first-generation college student, during his first year of college as he moved from a basic reading course into biochemis-try. Bruce leveraged audience awareness to write rhetorically and to comprehend difficult texts written for professional biochemistry researchers. Findings show that audience awareness is a threshold concept of reading, one that transforms academic literacy practices and that furthersidentity in disciplinary communities of practice. These findings support the teaching of audience awareness in secondary and postsecondary classrooms, but they also demand that we recognize the additional work basic writing students, like Bruce, must do to establish agency in a system that has labeled them underprepared.

Several writing studies have affirmed the literacies of young Black men in schooling contexts in humanizing ways, which has importantly moved us beyond rationalizing their literacy practices in educational spaces. Less of this important research has directly focused on young Blackmen who are deemed academically high-achieving in traditional English language arts (ELA)classrooms. Thus, academically high-achieving young Black men are often silent in literacy education and research; they have “untold stories,” as described by Shawn, the focal student inthis critical ethnographic case study. In an effort to provide literacy supports for these students and their ELA educators, I developed a consequential literacy pedagogy. In this article, I focuson consequential writing—one product of the consequential literacy pedagogy. Consequential writing concurrently develops academic and critical literacies. This layered literacy approach is intentionally developed by, for, and with historically marginalized communities to equip them to act against inequity within and beyond academic spaces through the learning, teaching, and sharing of writing. The current study cultivated consequential writing with a Black male student through a critical approach to metaphor. Metaphor is ideal for developing consequential writing due to its ability to simultaneously engage critical, creative, and cognitive literacies. In this paper,I address the following research question: How did an academically high-achieving Black male secondary student utilize the generative power of metaphor to cultivate consequential writing?Next, I illuminate the transferability of this work to support ELA educators in cultivating consequential writing with students beyond this study. Finally, I discuss some unintended consequences of consequential writing for Black youth in academic spaces that do not honor their lives or minds.

This article describes an after-school family literacy program as a model of multiliterate collaboration under and against English Only and anti-immigrant conditions. The model reveals how state politics surrounding language, ethnicity, and citizenship may interact with the activity systems of family literacy programs to redefine what counts as sanctioned language and literacy learning within school spaces. This article details the findings of a qualitative study and includes the goals and curriculum of the program, as well as the recruiting mechanisms, participants, participant feedback, and participant experiences. Findings from the study reveal the role of parental investment in language and literacy learning, language co-construction, and honoring of all languages, cultures, and experiences. This family literacy model contributes to literacy studies by offering possibilities for future school-sponsored, multiliterate family literacy research collaborations to draw from and extend the language and literacy practices and funds of knowledge of ELL students, parents, teachers, and literacy scholars working within English Only and anti-immigrant contexts.

Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.

This article discusses findings from two interconnected ethnographic studies on the out-of-school literacy practices of Black adolescent males: 18-year-old Khaleeq from the US Northeast, and 18-year-old Rendell from the US Midwest. The data analyzed derive from their engagements in nonschool, community-based, social justice initiatives that, we argue, represent rejections of deficit narratives about who they are (their racialized and gendered identities) and what they allegedly cannot do (their literacy capacities and capabilities). Utilizing a critical literacy approach that attends to out-of-school contexts, race, and counternarratives allows us to demonstrate how they questioned narratives of failure that unfairly place blame on Black youth and not on the structural inequalities endemic to US society. These narratives include (among others): the widening gap in achievement and high school graduation rates between Black and White male students in the United States; the school-to-prison pipeline and increasing drop-out and push-out rates that impact high school–aged Black males; and the overrepresentation of Black males in special education classes. Khaleeq and Rendell used literacies to question these racialized narratives and their consequences, and to produce counternarratives to negative assumptions about Black adolescents. As a result, we focus on how they cultivated their literacies, nurtured their spirits, and charted their own trajectories within community spaces when school was not enough. This analysis offers implications for how literacy practitioners and researchers can narrow the school community divide by lovingly attending to the out-of-school literacies of Black adolescents.

Two disabled researchers draw from their experiences conducting an interview study with a population of self-identified disabled faculty members to question some long-held commonplaces about qualitative interviewing. They use the phrase centering disability to emphasize disability as a critical lens and form of embodied experience that has theoretical and methodological implications for qualitative interviewing research design, implementation, and analysis.

In a moment when schools are failing to meet the needs of many youth, recent research has suggested that relational and art-based pedagogies, such as spoken word poetry, offer possibilities for repurposing classrooms to meet the needs of students who have experienced marginalization in schools and other institutions. This article contributes to the literature in critical pedagogy and youth spoken word by taking a retrospective perspective to analyze what a group of urban youth who experienced failure in schools remembered as meaningful from a high school poetry class they identified as empowering. Using case study and interview methods to unpack participants’memories of their poetry class as early adults, the study identifies that the poetry community served as a turning point for many youth because it allowed them to nurture healing relationships in the context of a school community that helped them shatter institutional silence about various forms of oppression and trauma and sparked changes in the ways they saw themselves as individuals and community members. Through participation in the structures and rituals of this literacy-learning community, participants remembered developing agentive identities and transforming their struggles into sources of strength. That this class and the writing practices it engendered continued to hold meaning for this group of youth, who had otherwise held generally negative narratives about schooling, advances current perspectives on the role of nontraditional approaches to literacy instruction in schools.

This article takes up an area of central concern for educators in an era of global connectivity: howto account for the mobility of people, texts, and practices while simultaneously addressing persistent educational inequalities. In attending to the ways people participate in unequal globalized contexts,even educational contexts constructed to bring students and teachers together, we examine how resources such as time, space, materials, national identity, genre, and language are all unequally distributed and unequally ordered in various hierarchies. We propose the notion of scale to offer literacy researchers a flexible conceptual tool with which to examine educational inequities by capturing how movement and mobility are not simple processes of relocation; rather, literacies and texts are always dynamically constructed in relation to hierarchical orders of varying spatial and temporal dimensions. Through multisited ethnography, we engage in a scalar analysis of teachers’ cross-cultural collaborations to illustrate how they produced various categories of space and time (e.g., local, national, global) through routine literacy engagements. In explaining how different scales are invoked, implicated, and constructed in interaction, we find that participants engaged in six scalar moves-upscaling, downscaling, aligning, contesting, anchoring, and embedding-and offer these in response to the pressing need to develop sensitive analytical toolsthat can bring to the surface the ways inequalities are inscribed in literacy practices and texts.Implications of conceptualizing scaling as literacy activity include disrupting smooth narratives of global connectedness in educational collaborations and highlighting the multiscalar nature of all literacy practice.

Much of the research on youth digital literacies relies on the experiences of exceptional cases, while less is known about more typical youth who share their writing in online spaces. Through the examination of a novice writer in an online space, this article explores the convergence of factors shaping young people’s networked writing and addresses recent critique of the New London Group’s(1996) Designs of Meaning framework. Data were gathered during a two-year ethnographic investigation of an online affinity space, The Sims Writers’ Hangout, and analyzed through a Designs of Meaning lens. Data sources include the writer’s posts on the site, responses she received from others, her Sims fan fiction texts, interview responses, and researcher field notes. Findings of this study make visible the multiple factors influencing this writer’s choices, revealing how Available Designs from within and outside the site shaped her creations and how she leveraged her online participation to Design products that met the expectations of this audience. This analysis contributes to the field’s understanding of how online affinity spaces influence youth digital literacy practices and argues that a Design perspective makes such shaping more visible. The article also argues for a more complicated notion of affinity space audiences as collaborators, rather than just supportive reviewers. These findings suggest the need for continued study of typical participation in online spaces and future research to examine networked writing within classroom contexts.

This phenomenological case study explores the disconnect that high school readers labeled as struggling perceived between their reading identities and experiences in traditional English classes. It analyzes how participation in a young adult literature (YAL) elective provided participants space in which to enact identities and exhibit agency in ways that were different from those afforded in their English classes. This paper contributes uniquely to the larger research conversation by examining two different spaces (traditional English classes and a YAL class) and demonstrating how students’ identities as readers manifested in different ways across two contexts. Using Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain’s (1998) theory of identity as a lens of analysis across student-generated oral reflections gathered through Seidman’s (2006) interview protocol, the study reveals how student participants were supported in their attempts to deconstruct their experiences in traditional classroom spaces, build new conceptions of their reading selves in a unique classroom setting, and, in the process, assume greater agency in shaping their individual reader identities, advancing the argument that differing classroom contexts can provide students with varying levels of opportunity to reject and/or accept ascribed reading identities. This work is significant in the way it emphasizes the importance of classroom and school contexts, the possibilities that come with inviting students to engage as readers in school rather than engage in school reading, the benefits and risks of reimagined relationships between students and teachers and students and peers, and the possibility that young adult literature in and of itself offers implications for reader agency.

Textbooks are commonly used to teach English in Africa, and most often are designed either by Westerners who are native speakers or by the Western-trained educators who took over the education of Africa’s children after colonialism. The issue is whether these educators can emancipate learners through the curricular choices they make in the versions of textbooks endorsed by their governments. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This article examines the content of nonfiction passages in four textbook series that have been used or are currently in use for English language and literacy education in Anglophone Cameroon to understand the shift in educational philosophies that might have occurred between the colonial period of the first textbook and the modern globalization period of current textbooks. It also questions the criteria for selection of passages to be included in these textbooks and their possible ramifications for learners’ identities as Africans,Cameroonians, and global citizens. Informed by postcolonialism, with a particular bent toward decolonial theory, the study utilizes content analysis, a qualitative research method that validates textual interpretations through inference (Krippendorf, 2004) and that seeks to understand meanings embedded in texts and their sociocultural/political significance. Findings reveal that while the Oxford English Readers for Africa of the colonial times are long gone, this series’ ideology of white superiority lingers in contemporary textbooks. They also reveal that there is an attempt to standardize cultural practices and belief systems based on Western models. This draws attention to minority rights, reminding educators to acknowledge pluralism in their literacy practices.

Literacy scholars have long studied migrant literacies in host countries, but have largely overlooked how emigration shapes literacy learning in migrants’ homelands. Yet homelands are crucial site sof literacy research, as left-behind family members of migrants learn new literacy practices to communicate with loved ones laboring or studying abroad. This article examines this overlooked phenomenon by reporting on an ongoing qualitative study of migrants’ family members and return migrants in a midsized town in Brazil. Further developing a sociomaterial framework for transnational literacy, it demonstrates that emigration promotes literacy learning among homeland residents via the circulation of “writing remittances”—the hardware, software, and knowledge about communication media that migrants often remit home. As objects of emotional and economic value, writing remittances demand literacy learning as one condition of their exchange. Because such learning, like money, is fungible, homeland residents often circulate and reinvest it locally, with varying returns. Writing remittances mediate both intimate interpersonal communication and the larger context of global economic inequity in which migrant families are implicated, making such remittances rich sites of print and digital literacy practice across borders.

While English literature once occupied a central position in national curricula, enrollment in the subject has undergone a continuing decline in English-speaking countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. Its marginal position may also be observed in formerly colonized countries such as Singapore, where the subject was introduced, appropriated, and reconstructed. My aim,in this paper, is to propose a reenvisioning of literature education premised on the principles of ethical cosmopolitanism. In the first part of the paper, I describe ethical cosmopolitanism by distinguishing it from strategic cosmopolitanism, which has more recently emerged in response to the pressures of economic globalization, leading to the economization of education. In the second part of the paper, I show how the principles of strategic cosmopolitanism have directed the national literature curriculum in Singapore through my analysis of the national syllabus and high-stakes examination papers from 1990 to the present. This leads to the third part of the paper, in which I use a case study of four literature teachers in Singapore secondary schools to characterize the ethical cosmopolitan pedagogies they employ to circumvent nation-centric, economic pressures of strategic cosmopolitanism operating at the national level. More importantly, I discuss how such pedagogies have the potential to foster a hospitable imagination, which constitutes the strongest defense one can give to literature education in the context of an increasingly culturally complex,connected, and contested global sphere.

There is considerable confusion in contemporary society when it comes to talking about race.Because of this confusion, race talk in schools can be fraught with difficulty, leading to problematic conversations, disconnections, and ultimately student disengagement. While studies in psychology, sociology, and linguistics have considered the role of race in discourse, there have been fewer of these investigations in English education, especially research on the teaching of literature. This article looks closely at the classroom talk of two veteran English teachers’ one an African American man, the other a White woman’ in a racially diverse high school, showing how teachers employ different strategies to navigate similarly fraught conversations. Taking an interactional ethnographic approach, I demonstrate ways that conversations about race that emerged from literature units in both classrooms opened up opportunities for some students to participate, while constraining and excluding others. The results of the study revealed that the two teachers navigated these dilemmas through tactical and strategic temporary alignments of actions and discourse, but in both classes, silence and evasion characterized moments of racial tension. As a growing number of researchers and teacher educators provide workshops and materials for teachers interested in classroom discourse studies, supporting new and experienced teachers’ investigations in this area may ultimately prove fruitful not only for teaching and learning, but also for race relations.

Current research suggests that attention to language variation in teacher preparation can promote equity and narrow achievement gaps, particularly for African American students. However, persistent ideologies about language and race can stymie teachers’ desires for equitable teaching.Teachers who take up linguistically responsive positions that value student language variation still struggle in the moments of enactment due to expectations that they serve as gatekeepers for “standard” English(es). In this article, I conceptualize these struggles as linguistic ideological dilemmas (LIDs) and use discourse analytic and qualitative methods to present illustrations of preservice English teachers’ LIDs as they grapple with deficit language ideologies in relation to course work about language variation. In the focal illustration, I use positioning theory to illustrate the LIDs faced by a student teacher when responding to a student’s blog writing that included features of African American English. The findings show how this participant and others hadlimited awareness of how they were positioned racially until the moment of teaching in which they struggled to articulate and enact linguistically informed principles; in some cases, this positionality led to avoidance of future discussions of race and language. The findings advance past scholarship through generative description of students’ internalized deficit language ideologies and teachers’ struggles with implementation related to valuing language variation. Findings show the affordances and limitations of code-switching for addressing language variation in classroom interactions and the need for preparation about when, how, and why to have conversations about language variation, including greater understanding of language-related ideological triggers.

This article discusses findings from a three-year ethnographic study of an ethnic studies course called Native American literature, which began during the passing of legislation that banned the teaching of ethnic studies in Arizona’s public and charter schools. The data analyzed here explore the ways students use silence as a form of critical literacy “or critical silent literacies” in response to racial microaggressions enacted by their peers, their teachers, or a combination of both. This framing of silence questions common assumptions that Native American students aresilent because of their biological, inherent, and/or cultural “traits” Challenging such assumptions, Native American students in this study reveal that as they attempt to voice their ideas, they are repeatedly silenced because their knowledges counter the dominant settler knowledges taught in public schools. As a result, they discuss how their silence has been used over time as a resistancestrategy to shield themselves, their identities, and their family and community knowledges from dominant, monocultural knowledges with which they did not agree.

For at least the last several decades, argumentative writing has been of central importance in secondary and higher education, and this emphasis has been heightened by argumentation’s designation as a “cornerstone” of the Common Core State Standards. Moreover, this focus on argumentation has been encouraged by extensive scholarship that investigates how argumentation is learned and deployed in various settings and how the teaching of argumentation might be improved. However, far less attention has been paid to determining why so many literacy educators,researchers, and policy makers believe that privileging argumentative writing is justified.Using a methodology that combines ethnographic case study of writing pedagogy in an urban high school with theoretical analysis of scholarly writings that endorse argumentation, in this essay I demonstrate that the prominence of argumentation is underwritten by three commonly held assumptions: (1) that argumentative writing promotes clear and critical thinking, (2) that it provides training in the rational deliberation that is essential for a democratic citizenry, and(3) that it imparts to students a form of cultural capital that facilitates their upward academic and socioeconomic mobility. My findings are that these assumptions are unwarranted and that schools’ overemphasis on argumentation imposes severe limits on what counts as valid thought,legitimate political subjectivity, and a feasible strategy for addressing economic inequality. This study’s implication is that educators should reassess the value of argumentation and revise ELA curricula to include more diverse genres and discursive modes.

We ended the previous volume year in deep contemplation about the final word of this journal's title: English. We asked, Why English? Why English only? Why not Research in the Teaching of English(es)? We begin this new volume year-RTE's 50th anniversary-thinking about the first word in the journal's title: research. We come to this first word having thought a great deal over the past several months about story. Perhaps it has been on our minds as we have brainstormed ways of marking this 50th volume year-a year that in any person or institution's life traditionally invites commemoration through stories. Story has crept into our conversations about manuscripts as we have pored over them, sometimes hearing the words of a former colleague, who-in his research methods courses-would often say of a research report: I believe the author, but the story's all wrong. We know for certain that story became a centerpiece of the discussions that unfolded at our weekly editorial team meetings after we read the five papers that comprise this issue. Many of the authors in this issue push on or play at the edges of the conventional research article published in the social sciences, inviting a conceptual turn from research report to story. As editors, we feel this conceptual turn, and the articles and essays that inspire this turn, foreground a set of social and ethical responsibilities that researchers in the teaching of English(es) carry into their inquiry and writing.Todd DeStigter opens this issue with argument about argument. Using ethnographic anecdotes drawn from his years of research in AP Composition courses in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side, DeStigter surfaces and questions the assumptions undergirding argument's esteemed status in the ELA curriculum. Like authors previously published in RTE (e.g., Newell, VanDerHeide, & Wynhoff Olsen, 2014), DeStigter takes up the epistemological underpinnings of argument, but rather than asking how students might be taught to write better argumentative essays, he explores why and how argumentative writing has assumed its place of privilege in U.S. curricula in the first place. In addition to questioning argumentation's utility in fostering democracy and students' socio-economic prospects, DeStigter makes visible a set of Cartesian and Kantian philosophies that pose questions not just for language and literacy educators, but also for researchers. To challenge argument's position of privilege is, among other things, to call into question the Cartesian and Kantian claims to an objective, made accessible through a combination of rigorous observation and abstract reasoning (p. 17). After perusing DeStigter's article, readers may wonder in relation to their own scholarly pursuits: What does it mean to know, and how varied or multiple might be our ways of knowing? Is there really such a thing as extra-human reality? Might the reality we report in the written accounts of our research be constructed by a human narrator, who, in showing her humanity, makes her reliability-or unreliability, for that matter-more visible? As researchers, we might even walk away from DeStigter's article asking ourselves whether knowing, convincing, and/or proving is, or ought to be, the function of research in the first place. Might research, like stories, serve to imagine, to evoke, to inspire? In the spirit of DeStigter's quest to legitimize other, nondominant modes of contemplation and expression as well as actions that grow from them (p. 30), this question seems well worth our consideration as teachers, as researchers, as persons.Like DeStigter, Rebecca Woodard contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about writing instruction, while also raising questions for the researcherwriters who comprise the readership of RTE. Her investigation into the links between two teachers' writing instruction and their out-of-school writing practices honors the rich histories and experiences of teachers beyond the confines of the professional. …

This study uses dialogic theory to understand teacher-writers’ practices across in- and out-of-school contexts. Using case study methods to closely observe and interview a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, as well as analyze their writing, the study identified similarities in the teachers’ appropriations of language, textual practices, and ideologies across contexts. However, each teacher appropriated distinct practices in discipline-specific ways, with one focused onthe literate practices of creative writers and the other focused on the literate practices of online, networked writers. These contrastive examples highlight ways in which teacher-writers’ literate and instructional activities dialogically inform each other in both similar and distinct ways. Ultimately, I make the argument that dialogic perspectives that attend to teachers’ out-of-school practices provide richer, more complex understandings of instructional practice than currently popular conceptions of “best practices” and “value-added” teaching.

In this article, I report on the results of a case study of two students with self-identified Asperger Syndrome (AS) in first-year university writing courses. After exploring existing conversations that tend to ignore the voices of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), I propose a methodology based on the concept of ASD as insight, rooted in critical disability studies, in which the perspectives of neurodiverse students are prioritized. My findings reveal the neurotypical assumptions of some traditional writing pedagogies, such as those based on a process model and the understanding of writing as a social activity. These approaches often do not value the critical literacies and social activities involved in writing done by neurodiverse students outside the classroom. Drawing from my participants’ insights, I explore the potentials of critical pedagogy for valuing the neurodiverse social literacies of ASD students. I demonstrate how a critical pedagogy better attuned to neurodiversity can support the alternative social literacies of neurodiverse students and resist stereotypes of ASD writers as asocial.

Current research suggests that emotional investment is essential for helping students critically engage in learning in the English language arts classroom. Yet, scholarship on the role of emotion in literary response has been limited, focusing chiefly on considerations of the merits of personal response—a focus that reflects dominant theories of emotion as located in the individual. Tethered to the personal, emotion has been conceptualized as a peripheral part of literary engagement—as something to be ignored, leveraged, or gotten beyond in an effort to move students toward more substantial textual engagement. This paper proposes that a sociocultural theory of emotion provides a new lens for considering how emotion engages students in literature learning. In this view, emotion is in the fabric of every classroom context, manifesting as “emotional rules” that have material implications for learning. Constructed using methods from Critical Discourse Analysis, the case study outlined in this paper demonstrates how emotional rules were perceived, taken up, and even transformed by one student, Nina, in two discussion contexts—a seminar circle and a literature circle—playing a central role in the work of literature learning in each context. Our findings advance scholarship on the relationship between response and emotion by suggesting that emotion cannot simply be invited in or left out of the literature classroom in the interest of moving students toward literary engagement, but instead is already fundamentally a part of literary engagement and must be noticed, interrogated, and sometimes disrupted in the interest of expanding interpretive possibilities.

This November issue of RTE once again contains the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English.” This bibliography includes abstracts of selected empirical research studies as well as titles of other related studies and books published between June 2013 and May 2014. Abstracts are only written for research studies that employed systematic analysis of phenomena using experimental, qualitative, ethnographic, discourse analysis, literary critical, content analysis, or linguistic analysis methods. Priority is given to research most directly related to the teaching of English language arts. Citations in the “Other Related Research” sections include additional important research studies in the field, position papers from leading organizations, or comprehensive handbooks.

Although current research and professional development on teaching of argumentative writing focus on “best practices,” we offer the construct of argumentative epistemologies to consider how English language arts teachers approach teaching and how they understand their students’ capacity for and interest in argumentation. Drawing on historical emphases in writing theory, we describe and illustrate three argumentative epistemologies: structural, ideational, and social practice. In an observational study of 31 high school English language arts classrooms, teachers’ enacted writing instruction foregrounded either formal elements of students’ arguments, the ideas and content of students’ arguments, or consideration of the complexity and variability of social contexts within which students wrote arguments. Case study analysis of three teachers illustrates the three argumentative epistemologies, how these epistemologies were socially constructed during instructional conversations, and how they were made visible through language use in and about classroom literacy events. These argumentative epistemologies have significance for teacher education, school writing research, and professional development, furthering our understanding of how and why teachers choose to adopt particular approaches to argumentative writing.