English/Language Arts Education

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.

This study examined the understudied phenomenon at the intersection of teachers’ social media (SM) use, civic engagement, and English disciplinary instruction. The authors invited 18 in-person preservice teachers and nine online in-service teachers enrolled in their Teaching Multiliteracies courses to engage in a think-aloud protocol (Carpenter, 2024) while reading/viewing SM and considering applications for civically engaged ELA teaching. Data generated included artifacts participants produced during the think-aloud exercise. The authors collected digital and hardcopy visual maps of students’ SM use, video recordings, and peer partner notes. Data were analyzed using open (Maxwell, 2013) and in-vivo coding (Miles, et al., 2014) and content analysis (Neuendorf, 2016; Saldaña, 2015). Findings are presented in three themes that emerged from the data. Teachers navigated their SM in ways that disrupted a personal-professional dichotomy associated with teachers’ SM use; teachers negotiated and reconciled their conceptualizations of “the local” across SM and their classrooms; and they effectively connected politics across scales in their imaginings of civically engaged ELA instruction. The paper concludes with implications and instructional recommendations for English teacher education to offer teachers necessary support for learning to teach with SM’s digital, networked texts.

This poetic inquiry integrated a Black Educational Studies perspective on the relationship between digital community platform design conditions and forms of collegiality, mutuality, and solidarity that advance a humanizing praxis for educators. The authors contextualized this pursuit in the urgency of the current moment when coordinated fascist attacks are attempting to exhaust and erase long-held strivings for a justice-oriented, identity-affirming public education. Through an explorative case study on the 2022-23 redesign of the open-access Black Lives Matter at School (BLM@School) Curriculum Resource Guide, the authors interrogated the intertwining of concrete vulnerabilities and radical horizons for justice-oriented educators within digital platform design conditions and community infrastructuring. They explored how Gilmore’s (2008) practical syncretism rubric of stretch, resonance, and resilience influenced the redesign approach, while also revealing some of the remaining generative tensions existing in the “in-between-ness” of BLM@School’s ongoing transgressive experiment, where BLM@School organizers presumed their power and presence in pursuing material opportunities to realize radical-futures-in-the-making within and beyond the project of schooling altogether. Insights are offered for ways this may be taken up within English language arts teacher education.