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Early career teachers (ECTs) of Color are key in making change, resisting racism and pushing back against white supremacy in K-12 education, specifically in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms. Through a narrative telling inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) of Nora, an Asian American ELA ECT in the Midwest, and by drawing on Fisher’s (2011) Critical Integral Pedagogy of Fearlessness, this study aims to recognize the narrative power within teaching praxis as Nora stories herself toward becoming a critical pedagogue.

Using narrative inquiry methodology and methods (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000), the authors simultaneously considered the commonplace tenets of narrative inquiry – temporality, sociality and place – of the intertwined relationships of the participants and observers. The field texts included in the corpus of data include myriad tellings of Nora’s experiences in her initial years of teaching ELA. Data were analyzed in stages of parsing out narrative blocks and structures.

The findings indicate that Nora, as an ECT, went through recursive cycles of fear as conceptualized by Fisher (2011) – bravery, courageousness and being fear-less – of working toward radical love (Hooks, 2000) within her ELA instruction. The authors argue that Nora confronted her personal and professional fears as she strove to become a critical pedagogue in her ELA classroom.

Current scholarship portrays ECTs as lacking agency in their development and/or effectiveness in the classroom and little is said about Asian American ELA ECTs and critical instruction. The authors present Nora’s counter-narrative to make visible what is right with ELA ECTs, specifically teachers of Color, as they transform their fear into courage to fight for educational equity.

This paper aims to explore teachers’ shifts in pedagogy and practice as they implemented a project-based learning (PBL) approach to teaching English Language Arts (ELA) for the first time.

The authors interviewed 10 ninth-grade ELA teachers in three schools after their first year enacting PBL. Initial codes were developed deductively from the interview questions and others emerged from the data. The authors also used memos to contextualize the interviews and triangulate findings.

Teachers described embracing new, expansive approaches to teaching ELA as they shifted from focusing on skills to big questions, and from literary analysis to “real-world” writing and assessment. These data illuminated three tensions around “traditional” versus PBL approaches to ELA: What counts as ELA? What counts as student success? And is PBL for everyone?

Few studies have explored teacher perceptions of PBL in secondary ELA classrooms. This paper uniquely illuminates some pathways for addressing the tension between “traditional” and PBL approaches. The authors call for deliberate, ongoing and gradualistic approaches to engaging in PBL routines that support educators to make meaningful shifts in instruction.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a pedagogical innovation – a matrix construction exercise – intended to help pre-service teachers (PTs) navigate the multiple and oftentimes competing discourses that shape the school subject English Language Arts (ELA).

To explore the various ways the PTs drew on the discursively constructed paradigms of ELA throughout their teacher preparation program, researchers (themselves teacher educators) conducted an intertextual analysis (Prior, 1995) of PTs’ classroom texts and interview transcripts.

The intertextual analysis suggested that PTs possessed knowledge of and investment in a range of discourses, which they used to anchor their own pedagogical and curricular decision-making and to anticipate the leanings and ideologies of other stakeholders in ELA. Although the organizational schema of the matrix proved helpful from an orientation standpoint, it also may have disguised the productive tensions between particular discourses for some PTs.

Although scholars have long noted the plurality of the school subject English and some studies on innovations in teacher education allude to the difficulties that teachers encounter as they navigate the multiple purposes of ELA, there is little scholarship that considers how pre-service and beginning teachers might best navigate that incoherence and unwieldiness. This study, which contextualizes and explores a pedagogical innovation in an English methods class designed to help PTs navigate the many “Englishes”, attempts to fill this gap. The findings suggest that teacher preparation in ELA would do well to conceive of pedagogical innovations in teacher education that allow teachers to grapple with, rather than solve, the uncertainty and unfinalizability of the discipline.

Although English Language Arts (ELA) teachers have historically been expected to take the lead in literacy training, the domain of ELA has yet come to terms with what holds it together as a discipline. Within this conundrum, the author studied one group of ELA teacher leaders who led a professional development (PD) aimed at training teachers in disciplinary writing instruction. This study aims to explore the differences in perspectives between what constitutes disciplinarity for ELA teachers and teachers in other content areas.

Over the course of two years, the author observed the PD, taking extensive field notes, collecting artifacts and conducting interviews. The author engaged in constant comparative analysis of the data throughout this time, open coding within each data source and then triangulating the data to support the author’s finding.

Whereas the ELA teacher leaders seemed to focus on general aspects of writing, teachers from the other content areas shared discipline-specific understandings about writing. The teachers and teacher leaders, however, did not explicitly discuss these differences in how they conceptualized writing instruction; rather, this tension was revealed through the author’s analysis of the data.

The findings of this study illustrate how a vague definition of writing in English and of disciplinary literacy has come to bear on one PD of writing. This study recommends future research to continue to develop clear epistemologies, purposes and literate practices of the disciplines related to ELA.

The purpose of this study is to understand how preservice teachers (PTs) learn about disciplinary literacy in English language arts (ELA). In mathematics and writing, research has found that teachers’ participation in disciplinary work can support their understanding of domain-specific inquiry, problem-solving and argumentation.

This exploratory, qualitative case study of an English methods course extends that work into ELA, asking how PTs’ participation in collaborative literary reasoning (CLR) influences their understanding of ELA as a discipline and their instructional planning processes.

Findings indicate that CLR supported PTs to define ELA as a collaborative discipline in which multiple interpretations of literature are valued; to name specific disciplinary literacy practices; to identify a focus and purpose for teachers’ design and revision of lesson plans; and to inform their thinking about text selection and complexity.

This work highlights the potential of collaborative literary reasoning to support PTs’ learning about disciplinary literacy instruction.

In this article, the authors, a university elementary social studies methods faculty member and a district social studies supervisor, discuss the creation of sustained professional development (PD) for elementary teachers on integrated social studies instruction.

The authors detail the development of a PD sequence that included two 45-minute whole-group PD sessions and two days of individual and small-group school-day coaching for each school in the district. The ultimate goal of this PD was to provide the classroom teachers with the pedagogical content knowledge to meaningfully integrate social studies and English language arts (ELA) in their classrooms.

The collaboration between the university faculty member and the district administrator allowed for the development of meaningful, sustained PD for the classroom teachers.

This work has implications related to the development of PD to integrate social studies and ELA for university faculty working with teachers in school-based settings and for school administrators seeking to provide more PD for their teachers.

This paper aims to examine the reading of a book-length fiction or non-fiction text in one disciplinary literacy (DL) teacher education course. This paper considers how the assignment may help pre- and in-service teachers understand literacy as multifaceted and connected within and beyond their content areas (Moje, 2015). The research explores how reading a book-length text may help support DL, equity-oriented curricula that consider literacy as empowerment and connected to lived and communal experiences (González et al., 2005; Muhammad, 2020).

This work is grounded in a qualitative, humanizing methodology and thematic analysis approach (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Paris and Winn, 2014). This approach examines student work in one DL course, considering how teachers within and beyond English language arts (ELA) respond to the task of reading a book-length text.

First, the assignment offered space for participants to redefine literacy as empowerment and enjoyment. Second, the assignment helped participants connect literacy within and beyond their content areas and to see literacy as active and interdisciplinary. Third, the assignment includes clear limitations for a DL approach, particularly when participants focus mainly on connections to their content area. This sometimes obfuscated participants’ enjoyment of reading.

The study offers a new perspective on a task that is often seen as specifically “ELA”: reading a book-length text. This project offers space for ELA educators to consider literacy from a DL, equity-oriented framework focused on enjoyment in literature within and beyond ELA classrooms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how three young women of color responded with “outlaw emotions” to the novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz in a literature discussion group. This paper considers how readers respond with outlaw emotions and how responses showed emotions as sites of control and resistance. The aim of this paper is to help English language arts (ELA) teachers construct culturally sustaining literature classrooms through an encouragement of outlaw emotions.

To examine how youth responded with emotion to Aristotle and Dante, the author used humanizing and ethnographic research methodologies and conducted a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, journal entries from youth and researcher memos.

Analyses indicated that youth responded with outlaw emotions to Aristotle and Dante, and these responses showed how youth have both resisted and been controlled by structures of power. Youth responses of supposed “positive” or “negative” emotion were sites of control and resistance, particularly within their educational experiences. Youth engaged as a peer group to encourage and validate outlaw emotions and indirectly critiqued emotion as control.

Although many scholars have demonstrated the positive effects of out-of-school book clubs, there is scant research regarding how youth respond to culturally diverse literature with emotion, both outlaw and otherwise. Analyzing our own and characters’ outlaw emotions may help ELA educators and students deconstruct dominant ideologies about power, language and identity. This study, which demonstrates how youth responded with outlaw emotions and gave evidence of emotions as control and resistance, shows how ELA classrooms might encourage outlaw emotions as literary response. These findings suggest that ELA classrooms attempting culturally sustaining pedagogies might center youth emotion in responding to literature to critique power structures across the self, schools and society.

This study aims to understand the supports and challenges to using disciplinary and antiracism lenses when teaching with informational texts in middle grades English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms.

This paper analyzes teacher talk in four virtual sessions with four middle grades ELA teachers in one school district. Teachers had recently completed a voluntary, school-based antiracism professional development. Researchers used thematic analysis of session transcripts and semi-structured interviews.

Teachers’ informational text use was nested in and directed by curriculum and contexts that limited disciplinary and antiracist teaching. The context and texts constrained instruction to basic reading skills. Equity was conceptualized as supporting students’ persistence. Discussions of race were avoided.

This study has implications for ELA teacher preparation, and district and state resources to support merging disciplinarity and antiracism in informational text instruction in ELA. The study is limited by the small sample from one district and access to only teacher self-reports.

Secondary ELA disciplinary literacy has privileged literature, yet there is an increase of informational text use in middle grades ELA. Teachers need support teaching informational texts through disciplinary and antiracism lenses.

The purpose of this two-part research was to investigate the effect of remote learning on student progress in elementary education. Part 2, presented in this paper, is a follow-up study to examine how student progression in the two pandemic-induced environments compared to the pre-pandemic conditions.

The authors expanded the quantitative, quasi-experimental factorial design of the authors' initial study with additional ex-post-facto standardized test score data from before the pandemic to enhance the group comparison with a control: the conventional pre-pandemic classroom environment. Thus, the authors were able to examine in which ways the two pandemic-induced learning environments (remote and hybrid) may have affected learner progress in the two subject areas: English Language (ELA) and Math. Additionally, the authors provided a grade-by-grade breakdown of analysis results.

Findings revealed significant group differences in grade levels at or below 6th grade. In the majority of analyzed comparisons, learner achievement in the hybrid group was significantly lower than those in either the remote or the classroom group, or both.

The additional findings further supported the authors' initial hypotheses: Differences in the consistency and continuity of educational approaches, as well as potential differences in learner predispositions and the availability of home support systems may have influenced observed results. Thus, this research also contributes to the general knowledge about learner needs in elementary education.

During the pandemic, remote learning became ubiquitous. However, in contrast to e-learning in postsecondary education, for which an abundance of research has been conducted, relatively little is known about the efficacy of such approaches in elementary education.