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This paper aims to highlight a reconstructive lens on one white teacher’s critical approach to teaching literacy. This work equally highlights the importance of anti-racist approach to critical pedagogies centered on a humanizing ethic of cariño.

Drawing on portraiture and qualitative methods, this paper uses the reconstructive analysis of one white teacher’s efforts to disrupt white supremacy through critical pedagogies.

The author posits that Mr Hope was able to take on critical approaches to teaching literacy and design anti-racist pedagogies by honoring his students’ lived experiences. An ethic of cariño is embodied to design critical pedagogical choices and interactional moves that center the experience of immigrant-origin Latinx youth.

This study contributes to a growing body of literature on reconstructive discourse analysis. The author suggests that taking a “reconstructive” approach to discourse analysis requires that researchers move beyond a narrow focus on transcripts of classroom interaction. The author suggests that a reconstructive lens requires that focus is not solely placed on the interactional level of the transcript, but rather that interactional data be put in conversation with other data sources.

The author offers pedagogical implications for anti-racist teaching perspectives and offers key elements to critical pedagogies that engage Latinx students and center their experiential knowledge as a catalyst for curriculum design.

To date, few studies have explored how teachers of immigrant-origin Latinx students are intentionally resisting white supremacy and crafting anti-racist approaches to critical pedagogies.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the plans for and implementation of critical dramatic inquiry with middle school youth. The authors also provide a theoretical frame for understanding dramatic inquiry as an embodied, persuasive and reflexive practice that can inform and transform the ways youth and their teachers experience their own and others’ worlds. Throughout, the authors argue for the centrality of imagination in youth literacies and critical inquiry.

Working with Stetsenko’s (2008) concepts of contribution and agency, the authors considered the different ways youth “found [their] place among other people and ultimately, [found] a way to contribute to the continuous flow of sociocultural practices” (p. 17). Further, the authors considered Stetsenko’s (2012) reference to moral philosophy and the idea that “humans are understood as being connected with the world precisely through their own acts – through what has been termed “engaged agency” in moral philosophy (Taylor, 1995, p. 7)”. The authors read and annotated documents, noting key moments in the videos where youth collaborated in “finding a place among other people” and became “connected with the world […] through their own acts”.

The authors identified three ways dramatic inquiry orients youth in time-space, offering addresses and possibilities for answerability that direct their actions toward critical, ethical questions: creating a life through embodied positioning, reflecting on action through transformation of representations and establishing a direction for one’s own becoming through persuasion and answerability. These three modes of contributing to a dramatic inquiry extend current research and thought about drama by pointing to specific contributions to and purposes for action in drama experiences.

This work represents a single two-session workshop of teacher research with middle school youth engaged in dramatic inquiry, and is, therefore, the beginning of a conceptual framework for understanding dramatic inquiry as critical sociocultural practice. As such, this work will need to be developed with the aim of extending the dramatic inquiry work across several days or weeks, to trace youth insights and subsequent actions.

Critical literacy educators who want to implement dramatic inquiry will find clear descriptions of practices and an analytic framework that supports planning for and reflection on social change arts-based experiences with youth.

The authors argue that educators who aim to support youth actions, in relation to multiple viewpoints and possible futures, need to pose imagined and dramatized addresses to which youth can imagine and embody possibilities and express possible answers (Bakhtin). Based on Stetsenko’s transformative activist stance, the authors argue that drama-based experiences disrupt the everyday so youth may collectively explore and contribute to an emerging vision of equity and belonging.

Few studies have engaged Stetsenko’s transformative activist stance as a way to understand learning, social change and the role of imagination. This study describes and explores a unique instantiation of process drama informed by critical sociocultural theory.

The purpose of this study is to examine the experiences of Latinx preservice teachers (PSTs) while enrolled in a teacher preparation program in the New Latinx South, a cluster of states that have seen a precipitous growth in the Latinx population over the last decades.

The authors used pláticas, or informal conversations with a group of six female Latinx PSTs.

Two main themes were identified: experiences with racism and discrimination and feelings of isolation. These themes, along with the narratives of the participants, reflect the barriers this population experiences in the education field and how professionals in this field can improve to best assist Latinx PSTs.

Latinx PSTs’ experiences are yet to be fully investigated to improve not only their schooling but also the number of Latinx teachers serving a growing number of Latinx children in US schools. Additionally, the use of pláticas elevates this paper as this is a method valued by the participants and used in their communities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the storied lives of teacher leaders involved in the implementation of a dual language education program for elementary English learners with an emphasis on the role of reflexive methodology in bringing emergent themes to light.

The theory of qualitative bricolage informed the design of the study. Narrative inquiry with a heuristic lens allowed the researcher to explore the storied lives of teachers during an innovative change initiative.

Intergroup communication breakdowns between two diverse groups of teachers, European American and Latino, emerged as a relevant theme. The adaptive methodological approach was critical to the emergence of this theme, indicating that teacher leadership can and should be studied by teachers who know and empathize with the participants and their experiences.

Teachers’ stories demonstrate that cross-cultural communication was challenging and ultimately, detrimental to the program’s development. These themes point to the need for further research regarding how diverse groups of school leaders interact on decision-making teams and how adaptive research techniques can assist in examining intergroup behavior.

Findings are presented via a polyphonic account that includes multiple teachers’ voices, concluding with found poetry that illustrates the challenge of communicating across the cultural divide.

The purpose of this paper was to highlight ways two novice secondary English teachers negotiated the politics of college and career readiness along with the literacy needs of students, in the age of accountability.

This three-year longitudinal qualitative case study focused on two participants in English teacher preparation and their first two years in the classroom.

The findings focus on participants’ definitions of college and career readiness as it pertains to their English Language Arts classrooms. Next, the focus is on two themes: tensions these novice teachers experienced as they attempted to build classrooms focused on postsecondary readiness, and the ways in which they worked to bridge the gap between their definitions of college and career readiness and the realities of their classrooms.

Connections among high stakes testing environments, postsecondary readiness and literacy teacher education are important to the field. Studying the experiences of novice teachers can fill a present gap at the intersection of these concepts.

Curriculum in teacher education should introduce standards, as well as provide a platform for negotiating and critiquing them. Three focus areas to help pre-service teachers mitigate tensions between minimum skills assessments, college readiness and literacy are personal experience, collaboration and reflective partnerships.

There has been little to no research done on the tensions between preparing all students to be college and career ready and the minimum skills based priorities that govern many school systems and its impact on novice teachers. This classroom reality is important to literacy teacher education.

With an increasing emphasis on the reading development of L2 learners of English and a growing body of literature on L2 reading, it is now time to examine what the current research on L2 reading says about L2 learners’ reading development and to discuss what would be a desirable future for L2 reading studies. Focusing on the L2 reading of upper elementary, middle and high school students in L1 settings, this study aims to carefully, but critically, explore the major research studies published in the past three decades. In particular, it uses sociocultural and critical frameworks that view language as a social phenomenon and literacy as a constellation of socially contextualized practices to explore the issue of L2 reading.

To identify key findings about L2 reading, a systematic literature review of studies examining L2 reading in L1 settings was conducted. A critical examination and analysis of 91 studies on L2 reading for upper elementary students (Grades 4-12) are presented here. Based on the literature review, the major issues addressed in the previous section are revisited, and the requirements of future research on L2 reading are discussed.

Three major changes have taken place in L2 reading studies: from monolingual/L1-based research to multilingual/L2-based research; developing the socially situated model of literacy (literacies); and adopting a sociocultural and critical lens: L2 reading and L2 reading assessment. Based on the critical review of the major research studies published in the past three decades, this paper identifies the research and approach required to advance the field of L2 reading: the continua of L1 and L2 reading, macro–micro analysis of L2 reading context and diversification of L2 reading research.

Based on a systematic literature review, it demonstrates the current trends in L2 reading research, to examine the key findings and implications, and to identify what additional research or paradigms are required to advance the field. The literature review presented in this paper helps language educators, policy-makers and school administers at all levels in both first-and second-language contexts to better understand the rapidly increasing number of L2 English learners in L1 classroom settings.

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.

Since a teacher's identity is the result of ongoing discussion, explanation, negotiation and justification, famous education quotes were integrated into a language teacher practicum in a teacher education program in the northwest university in Taiwan. This study aims to explore the influence of discussing education quotes on 10 English as a foreign language student teachers' professional identities. This study also aims to discuss the following research questions.

This case study focused on 10 student teachers' identity construction in a practicum class under one advisor. According to Merriam (1998), a case is a “thing, a single entity, a unit around which there are boundaries” (p. 27). The case was a practicum and the unit of analysis was participants' identity construction.

First, reading and discussing famous quotes was a useful “discourse” and “language” for student teachers to construct and negotiate their identities. Second, through the integration of reading and discussing quotes, participants revealed more professional identity in knowledge and expertise, particularly in English instruction in the post-test.

This study examined the influence of discussing educational quotes of 10 students’ professional identity. However, given the nature of the study, there were some limitations. First, although the small sample size offered rich data through observation, artifacts and pre-and post-tests, it restricts our ability to generalize the results.

This study is highly practical (i.e. learning by discussion) and strongly interactive among the participant in a professional and social context. The conceptual framework in Figure 1 presents a theoretical framework supporting reading and discussing quotes as the discourse for the student teachers for their professional identity construction. Social context and relationship shape their professional identity (Izadinia, 2013). Student teachers spent much of their time with their cooperating teachers and administrators in their cooperating schools. In order to foster student teachers’ professional identity construction, it is recommended that student teachers should be encouraged to read and discuss educational quotes with teachers and administrators in their cooperating schools as a mean of professional dialogue and learning.

In this study, it was argued that educational or English teaching quotes could be used as viable, effective and appropriate materials in documenting student teachers' professional identity construction out of their classroom practice in their practicum. The findings of this study derived from the nature of 10 student teachers' professional learning via discussing famous education sayings, and professional learning took place during the practicum.

Most of the studies reviewed above were small-scale and qualitative case studies. Some involved only one or two single cases (e.g. Antonek et al., 1997; Calandra et al., 2006; Camp, 2013). Only a few studies were analyzed and explored based on theoretical frameworks (e.g. Chasteen, 2015). No explicit references were made to any theoretical frameworks in most of the studies. This study included both qualitative (observation and artifacts) and quantitative data (pretest and posttest) to explore the influence of discussing education quotes on 10 student teachers' professional identities and reflective practices.

In this qualitative case study, we examine pre-service teachers’ understandings’ of history as narrative. This analysis specifically explores the kinds of new historical narratives pre-service teachers create as a result of purposeful secondary social studies methods instruction that juxtaposes traditional narratives (e.g. individual achievement and motivation) and alternative narratives (e.g. those attentive to empathy and race, class, and gender) in an effort to help future teachers understand the nature of critical historical inquiry. In examining the understandings and initial efforts of young secondary social studies teachers, the study concludes that while troubling the traditional narrative is viable and likely event, the challenges of developing critical historical inquiry are clear and persistent.

The use of six non-fiction graphic novels to teach historical agency in a social studies methods course was examined in a critical action research study. Pre-service social studies teachers were asked to read one graphic novel and to discuss it with classmates, first in literature circles, then as a whole class. Data revealed graphic novels engaged pre-service teachers in thinking about historical agency, and helped them make connections between historical agency and their own agency. There were three overlapping ways pre-service teachers connected to historical agency in all six graphic novels: upbringing and personal experience, unpredictability of historical situations, and injustice. The findings highlight the value of graphic novels for teaching about historical agency in social studies courses because of their focus on historical agents’ positionality.