Against the backdrop of White Christian nationalism, which fomented an intensifying atmosphere of religious marginalization and violence toward transnationals in the US between 2015 and 2020, and in the context of teachers responding to this atmosphere of marginalization and violence with their writing curriculum and pedagogies, this study compared how three transnational youth wrote to express religious being and belonging in secondary classrooms. Adapting portraiture research approaches in a narrative study, we explored the how, who, and why of transnational youth writing across three classrooms where teachers made room for their cultural identity meaning-making through composing in diverse modes, genres, and media. In dialogue with pluriversal theorizing about the religious, specifically individual experiences of religious being and collective experiences of belonging, the research composed and compared portraits across three different public school settings. Working with three previously generated data sets, we retroactively asked: How, for whom, and to what purposes did three transnational youth express religious being and belonging through writing in public US secondary classrooms? The portraits illuminate how these youth wrote to accurately portray Islam, to poetically express and analytically discuss the fears and vulnerabilities Muslim women experience in wearing the hijab, and to share and interpret Christian familial experiences with ethnoreligious violence. In conclusion, we highlight complexities and further questions facing literacy teachers seeking to cultivate curiosity about youths’ religious being and belonging and to make room for these aspects of students’ experience as part of cultural assets approaches to writing curriculum and pedagogy.

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We end Volume Year 51 with a set of articles that emphasize language, particularly the teaching and learning of the grammatical structure, styles, and registers that undergird the English language arts and become ever more visible in a multilingual world.

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Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to (a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and (b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.

The editorial team introduces the February issue, which focuses on the affects, ideologies, and textual objects that influence the teaching and learning of English.

Editors Juzwik and Cushman introduce the November issue, which examines how teachers know, understand, and approach writing, the teaching of writing, and, more broadly, classroom discourse.

Scholarship in education and sociolinguistic studies of language and minority rights suggest that “the ascendancy of English as the current world language has also clearly impacted on the reach and influence of national languages other than English, while at the same time reconfiguring key language domains within and across nation-states such as the academy, business, technology and media” (May, 2012, p. 7). Precisely how and in what ways individuals navigate these key language domains is the focus of this issue.

In this issue, a group of emerging scholars take up diverse and timely questions about language ideologies, literate embodiments, and the ethically consequential relationships that come to be constructed, reflected, and contested at the scenes of written communication.

Although mounting research evidence suggests that dialogic teaching correlates with student achievement gains and with high levels of student engagement, little work in English education addresses the challenge of supporting new teachers in developing dialogically organized instructional practices. In a design-based study, we examine a curricular intervention designed to cultivate development of dialogically organized instructional practices, defined as instruction that provides students with frequent opportunities to engage with core disciplinary concepts through sustained, substantive dialogue. The curriculum invited secondary English teacher candidates to repeatedly enact dialogically organized instruction and to receive feedback from peers using video and Web 2.0-based technologies across a year-long student teaching internship. In English methods seminars, eighty-seven participants from two cohorts generated over 300 five-minute video clips, associated planning documents, transcripts, and reflections. We coded documents for student participation, evidence of planning for dialogic instruction, and classroom discourse variables associated in previous research with greater student engagement in substantive classroom interaction. We find that those who planned for dialogic instruction using dialogic tools were significantly more likely to have higher ratios of student utterances in relation to teacher utterances. The use of dialogic tools—conceptualized as those practical tools mobilized in teacher planning and practice with potential to mediate dialogically organized instruction in a given classroom situation—explained more of the variance in student participation than did any other factor. Attention to such tools may help English teacher candidates enact dialogically organized instructional practices.

This study charts the terrain of research on writing during the 6-year period from 1999 to 2004, asking “What are current trends and foci in research on writing?” In examining a cross-section of writing research, the authors focus on four issues: (a) What are the general problems being investigated by contemporary writing researchers? Which of the various problems dominate recent writing research, and which are not as prominent? (b) What population age groups are prominent in recent writing research? (c) What is the relationship between population age groups and problems under investigation? and (d) What methodologies are being used in research on writing? Based on a body of refereed journal articles ( n = 1,502) reporting studies about writing and composition instruction that were located using three databases, the authors characterize various lines of inquiry currently undertaken. Social context and writing practices, bi- or multi-lingualism and writing, and writing instruction are the most actively studied problems during this period, whereas writing and technologies, writing assessment and evaluation, and relationships among literacy modalities are the least studied problems. Undergraduate, adult, and other postsecondary populations are the most prominently studied population age group, whereas preschool-aged children and middle and high school students are least studied. Research on instruction within the preschool through 12th grade (P-12) age group is prominent, whereas research on genre, assessment, and bi- or multilingualism is scarce within this population. The majority of articles employ interpretive methods. This indicator of current writing research should be useful to researchers, policymakers, and funding agencies, as well as to writing teachers and teacher educators.

In The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, the editors have assembled a collection of new essays about genre, rhetoric, and writing that are relevant for scholars with a diverse range of interests in composition studies, including rhetoric, professional and scientific communication, computers and writing, writing-across-the-disciplines, literacy studies, and literacy education. The engaging editorial introduction recalls Donald Murray’s suggestion that writers ask of drafts, “Does it work?”