English/Language Arts Education

This article explores the pedagogical potential of music videos as both tools and rich texts for analysis in the secondary English classroom. Music videos, as a hybrid genre combining visual, auditory, and narrative elements that are deeply rooted in both online and offline spaces, offer unique opportunities for student-centered critical engagement and complex meaning-making. While current English education research (i.e., Grater & Johnson, 2013) framed music videos in the context of student cultural relevance and as a form of popular culture, the authors suggest deeper potential for intentionally incorporating music videos into the classrooms as digitally networked, interdisciplinary texts and tools for analysis. The work, grounded in critical literacy theories and a commitment to culturally sustaining pedagogies, asked the question, “What are the affordances of music videos as multimodal, digital texts in the secondary ELA classroom?” Through engagement in reflective practice on the authors’ work with students, teachers, and teacher educators, they analyzed how music videos can serve as critical digital tools for students and teachers.

This paper describes the work of three seventh-grade students in a semester-long superhero storytelling project in a midwestern middle school during spring semester 2019. In this paper, the researchers report their analysis of ethnographic data collected during this project to demonstrate how these three authors, who were all fans of the anime and manga franchise My Hero Academia (MHA), brought practices from their MHA fanfiction writing into their superhero storytelling. Using theories of transmedial narratology, the researchers identify three distinct practices this group described as part of their out-of-school fanfiction writing: character deck-creation, queer romantic (re)couplings, and participatory storytelling. They then trace these practices in the superhero story this group created to describe how these practices influenced their narrative. The researchers argue that teachers and teacher educators should see students’ fan fictional practices not only as legitimate reading and writing but also as challenges to the way they conceptualize narrative in schools.

In this current sociopolitical moment, teacher educators are dealing with challenges as they prepare future teachers to effectively use digital texts in their classrooms. This editorial articulates the backdrop of research, policy, and practice that English educators must navigate while teaching with digital texts, introducing this special issue as a tool for engaging pre- and in-service teachers around the complexities of digital texts. Across the articles, the authors provide English language arts (ELA) teacher educators with research about different types and modalities of digitally networked texts and various ways of engaging and analyzing them. They showcase both (a) pieces that synthesize interdisciplinary tools for analyzing particular types of digital texts on networked platforms that would be useful for ELA teacher educators and (b) studies that investigate how such tools and texts have been taken up expansively and productively in ELA classrooms.

Preparing preservice and early-career teachers to navigate digital texts, platforms, and practices in K-12 classrooms is one of the most pressing issues facing teacher education programs today. Teacher educators must equip students with the disciplinary knowledge to teach conventional approaches to English language arts and the ability to incorporate digital, multimodal, and youth literacies into their practice, approaches often positioned as competing goals in the literature. This study explored an early-career teacher’s experience designing a learning ecology that invites students to take up aesthetic literacies from literary studies and youth interpretive communities to create audiovisual essays. Drawing on data from students’ think-aloud protocols and teacher interviews, the study examined the relationship between pedagogical moves, composing practices, and the affordances of audiovisual essays. Findings suggest that early-career teachers who engaged with audiovisual essays developed a more expansive vision of intellectual work and digital pedagogy. Additionally, the findings demonstrate how teachers might model disciplinary practices and playful uses of aesthetic forms to create hybrid interpretive communities and cultivate aesthetic literacies. This study contributes to scholarship attempting to synthesize disciplinary and youth literacies perspectives while offering insight into ways teacher educators can support early-career teachers in designing learning experiences that are scholarly, culturally sustaining, and justice oriented.