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Textbook content and curricula are artifacts that can serve as indicators of social contexts and societal values. In this chapter, we use qualitative and quantitative content analysis to examine the content of Chinese language arts textbooks for basic education during a period of curriculum reform in China at the start of the 21st century. Given the important role of the Chinese language arts in the socialization of students into official societal values, this study seeks to provide insight into the nature of the official world view in China and addresses the societal ambivalence between global vs. national/local and traditional knowledge vs. Western/contemporary knowledge. We find that there is a slight increase in themes that reflect contemporary global concerns such as creativity and social justice. We also find that, in the face of the globalizing cultural influences of the new millennium, there is a sustained emphasis on the role of the Chinese language curriculum in the transmission of traditional Chinese cultural values and on the cultivation in Chinese students of an appreciation of their rich cultural traditions.

This study aims to draw from overlapping scholarship in critical policy studies and governmentality studies to examine how recent standards-based education policies mark a pivotal shift in the aims and governance of English education.

The author traces this shift through a comparative analysis of the past two standards projects in the USA: the 1996 IRA/NCTE Standards for the English Language Arts and the 2010 Common Core State Standards.

An analysis of the standards’ comparative development processes, educational aims and governmentalities exemplifies a global shift toward new policy networks, neoliberal imaginaries and the interrelated policy technologies of managerialism, performativity and free markets.

This paper hopes to prompt more critical, reflexive and strategic stances towards standardization and the ways in which global education policies seek to reshape subject English and the future of teaching and teacher education.

The purpose of this paper was to understand what disability-related curriculum (DRC) looked like in the middle school Language Arts classroom. DRC refers to any curricular material and related pedagogical approach intended to address students’ understanding of disability. The authors drew on the experiences of three in-service middle school Language Arts teachers to understand what disability-related texts they selected, and why they chose to incorporate DRC into their classrooms.

The authors used a qualitative, exploratory multi-case design to understand the what and why underlying three middle school language arts teachers’ use of DRC.

Findings from this study revealed that teachers leveraged DRC to broaden students’ understanding of diversity, increase empathy and provide exposure to disabilities; teachers gathered resources both online and within existing curriculum; and DRC varied in curricular and pedagogical structure.

The results of this study are exploratory. Although the aforementioned findings are promising, they are limited, due to the small sample size and relatively homogeneous participant demographics. Additional research that incorporates a larger and more diverse sample of participants would serve to broaden, or potentially confirm, the results of this study.

The results of this study provide insight into current practice around DRC while illustrating some of the limitations that teachers may encounter when integrating this practice.

While Language Arts curriculum often explores diversity in relation to race or class, it rarely focuses a lens on disability. This study fills a void in current research by providing empirical data on how educators approach the design and implementation of disability programming in their respective classrooms.

The varying traditions, goals, paradigms, and discourses associated with English language arts (ELA) underscore the degree to which there is not one school subject English, but many “Englishes.” In a neoliberal context, where movements like standardization and accountability stake claims about what ELA should be and do in the world, teachers, especially beginning teachers, can struggle to navigate the tensions engendered by these many and contradictory “Englishes.” This chapter attends to this struggle and delineates a process by which English Educators might illustrate the field’s vast and ever-changing terrain and support beginning teachers as they locate themselves in ELA. In delineating this process, we argue that in order to see and navigate the field in a neoliberal era, ELA teachers should treat the field as a discursive construction, constantly re-constructed by the dynamic play of social, political, and economic discourses. We argue that in treating the field as a discursive construction and exploring and locating themselves within the terrain, ELA teachers, rather than feeling powerless in the face of neoliberal forces, can leverage these different discursive forces, and gain footing in their classrooms, schools, and extracurricular communities to navigate the coexistence of many “Englishes” and argue for their pedagogical choices.

In this chapter, we explore our experiences of co-teaching an undergraduate elementary teacher education class titled, “Teaching Language Arts in FNMI (First Nations, Métis and Inuit) Contexts.” In our curriculum-making for the course, we drew on Narrative Inquiry as pedagogy, as well as on Indigenous storybooks, novels, and scholarship. We chose to work in these ways so that we might attempt to complicate and enrich both our experiences as teacher educators, and the possibilities of what it means to engage in Language Arts alongside Indigenous children, youth, and families in Kindergarten through Grade 12 classrooms. Thus, central to this chapter will be reflection on our efforts to co-create curriculum alongside of students – considered in their multiplicity also as pre-service teachers, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, etc. – in ways that honored all of our knowing and experience. The relational practices inherent to Narrative Inquiry and Indigenous approaches to education, such as the creation and sharing of personal annals/timelines and narratives, along with small and large group conversations and talking circles are pedagogies we hoped would invite safe, reflective, and communal spaces for conversation. While certainly not a tension-free process, all of the pedagogical choices we made as teacher educators provide us the opportunity to attend to the relational and ontological commitments of Narrative Inquiry, to the students in their processes of becoming, to Indigenous worldviews, and to the responsibilities of the Alberta Language Arts curriculum.

Many situations that affect the teaching of English have been unevenly examined in the scholarship. Asking the question, “What research in English teacher education will address the demands of preparing English language arts teachers for 21st century contexts?,” the authors provide recommendations to the field that will make our work more relevant and propose areas for further study based on current situations in English education in the United States that will move the field forward. The chapter suggests topics for further research centered on the English language arts-specific methods (pedagogy) course that includes exploring the tensions between literacy and English studies, integrating technology, moving theory into practice, the effects of high-stakes testing and assessments, and supporting more diverse student populations.

This chapter documents a commitment to culturally responsive teaching through the implementation of multimodal text sets in English language arts teacher education. Using a communities of inquiry framework inspired by justice-driven approaches to literacy learning, preservice teachers at New Mexico State University designed curriculum and instruction that considered the importance of students' digital literacies to meaning-making and communication. Through the presentation of a course unit that explores how multimodal text sets inspire literacy learning that is culturally relevant for students whose racial, linguistic, and cultural identities are often absent in mainstream school curricula, this chapter highlights the notion that digital literacies are accessible to and supportive of the minority serving educational institutions of New Mexico. Preservice teachers first considered what topics sparked their curiosity or inspired them to step into learning before exploring topics to which their future students will be drawn to investigate in language arts. Integrating two frameworks for creating text sets, preservice teachers then selected a targeted, canonical text around which to build their sets and supported it with multimodal scaffolding texts. Following the work and reflections of one focal student, this chapter offers unit descriptions, snapshots, and implications of personalized literacy experiences with creating inquiry-based, multimodal text sets in a secondary methods course.

This chapter provides a first-person account of the conceptualization and development of a new academic department at a large university in the American Southwest. It includes a description of the conditions that caused the new department to come into being, a discussion of debates surrounding the name and identity of the new department and a delineation of the context – political, social, and demographic – from which the department emerged. The chapter also includes reflections from former doctoral students on how the department's structure and focus influenced their professional identities and careers. The chapter is framed as one educator's story, in the tradition of “teacher stories” that emerged in the late twentieth century.

If given the choice, would we, as teacher educators, enter the profession again? Would we embark on a career that is faced with an antagonistic national context that has permeated nearly every aspect of a teacher’s existence – from the media to the teachers’ lounge, from the lack of support from parents to the lack of respect from students, from the misguided policies and accountability demands to the blanket, uncreative curriculum? How can we, as teacher educators who are doubting our own place in the field, reasonably expect to make a difference in the careers of our graduates? This chapter explores how and why the preparation of English Language Arts teachers must focus on three tenets in the present context for education: Advocacy, Humanity, and Hope. By examining different approaches that both authors have used with teacher candidates through multiple vignettes, we will create a deeper understanding of both the realities our new teachers face and the ways in which they can efficaciously face those realities and help reclaim the profession of teaching. Our work will be grounded in a blended framework of critical pedagogy and progressivism and thus examine these vignettes through that collective lens.

Teacher education in the United States has been widely criticized for its uneven and often poorly supported approach to preparing novices for clinical practice. In 2010, the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning (commissioned by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education) released a report titled “Transforming Teacher Education Through Clinical Practice: A National Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers.” The report called for teacher education to “be turned upside down,” a dramatic shift from traditional approaches to preparing teachers to “programs that are fully grounded in clinical practice and interwoven with academic content and professional courses” (p. ii). Many preparation programs in the United States are engaged in efforts to become more clinically rich in their approach to teacher preparation. This chapter will examine the call for more clinically rich approaches to English language arts teacher education, and will highlight how such a shift is integral to more socially just teacher preparation programs. Particular features of two clinically rich English language arts teacher preparation programs, one in California the other in New York, will be described and research focusing on the programs will be highlighted in an effort to share lessons learned.