English/Language Arts Education

instructional shifts to include new literacies. Ten teachers and 892 students participated, with a matched control group.  Participating teachers received a classroom set of laptops and up to 46 hours of training. Analyses indicate that professional learning opportunities that fostered conceptual understandings included the opportunity to observe in classrooms that were using new literacies and provided opportunities for hands-on practice and social construction of knowledge appear to have supported instructional changes. Students whose teachers were minimally trained did not have significant increases in writing achievement; however, students whose teachers received sustained training significantly increased their scores on high-stakes assessments. Increased scores were more pronounced for students who had been previously labeled as underachieving, a finding that fosters conceptualization of new literacies as transmediational and re-mediational.

This article explores the possibilities of incorporating collaborative digital storytelling into preservice teacher education to support teachers in learning about their students’ rich perspectives on teaching and learning. Data were gathered in an elementary literacy methods course at a public university in the northeastern United States to explore the possibilities of a digital storytelling collaboration between undergraduate preservice teachers and elementary students. The article concludes with a discussion of ways teacher education researchers and practitioners might utilize digital storytelling to keep record of the ways diverse students experience teaching and learning.

Supporting novice educators in developing culturally sustaining and universally designed literacy practices, which are also socially situated and contextual, can seem challenging in online learning environments without access to classrooms. This study sought to understand how novice educators developed literacy teaching practices infused with culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) and universal design for learning (UDL) in an online learning environment. The authors used the P+E Framework to support the conceptualization of social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence in an online graduate elementary literacy methods course. While all three forms of presence were necessary in the course, social presence and teacher presence needed to be frontloaded and intentionally cultivated to support the type of cognitive engagement necessary for UDL and CSP informed literacy instruction. Additionally, elements of UDL modeled through course design served as a secondary layer of learning that participants were able to notice and name without explicit teacher presence. Implications for teacher education are discussed, including how high-touch online literacy methods courses should model the bending of curriculum toward learners.

Teacher education (TE) programs have been historically white spaces that too often devalue and marginalize women of color (WOC) and their intellectual contributions. This paper, cowritten by two graduates of a predominantly White institution TE program and one of their professors –all three authors WOC with familial roots in Latin America – traces the ways that the centering of WOC knowledges and ways of knowing in teacher education can serve as an interruption to whiteness and a salve to the racial trauma too often inflicted on WOC in these programs. Specifically, it takes a WOC feminist lens to analyze the ways that multimodal projects, at times aided by digital technologies, provided WOC opportunities to utilize and explore their raced, cultured, and gendered experiences and knowledges within their TE program. This work suggests shifts in teacher education that allow for the centering of WOC perspectives, theories, and ways of knowing to reimagine TE built for and by WOC and their future students of color.