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This chapter examines in-service teachers’ transformed perspectives and practices for educating emergent bilinguals resulting from graduate study in a bilingual education graduate program in Chicago. This examination is contextualized in consideration of emergent bilinguals relative to the changing face of P-12 classrooms and gaps in teacher education. Findings from autoethnographic and discourse analytic inquiry suggest that teacher preparation in bilingual education (1) prepared and empowered in-service teachers to meet the academic, social, and cultural-linguistic needs of emergent bilinguals in their classrooms and (2) fostered a conscious inner transformation in in-service teachers that resulted in new ways and purposes of interacting with emergent bilingual students, their families, and colleagues. Findings also suggest that although there is institutional progress in meeting emergent bilinguals’ needs, it is incremental and insufficient. There are three major deficiencies: (1) new and increased teacher education standards lack the required specialized coursework in the education of emergent bilinguals; (2) teacher preparation of emergent bilinguals is inadequate; and (3) teacher preparation programs resist requiring specialized coursework in teaching emergent bilinguals.

Teacher education for social justice aims to enable teachers to work toward equity and justice in society and humanizing the educational experience of their students. Conceptualizing teaching as a political and ethical endeavor, social justice teacher education must engage seriously with the local and lived experiences of both teacher educators and student teachers. How then does teacher education for social justice move across communities and identities, and through cultural, social, geographic and temporal spaces? This chapter presents an autobiographical narrative inquiry into social justice teacher education across sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, across time, and within different educational communities. Bakhtin's dialogic theory (1981) helps to trace the narrative threads wherein “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (p. 293). The study examines my ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) as a critical teacher educator in the context of a youth mentoring service-learning course for undergraduate teacher candidates. I examine the complexities and tensions in exploring experiences and co-constructing understandings of oppression, privilege and social justice with my student teachers on the youth mentoring course in dialogic struggles with my experiences of justice and education in the USA and Hong Kong as an English-speaking Chinese American. Providing an in-depth examination of the convergence of identity, social relations, place, and time in my knowledge formation, I critically reflect upon the notion of social justice to suggest that social justice teacher education is multi-voiced and lived both locally and globally.

Labor unions play a key role in combating inequality. Recent research focuses on unions' ability to shape “moral economies” that make greater inequality socially inappropriate. But this research largely hypothesizes moral economy pathways for combating inequality, rather than showing them in action. Through a case study of the 2018 teachers' strike wave, we identify mechanisms that allow unions to shape moral economies. Based on analysis of in-depth interviews with key strike leaders, social media discussion groups, and contemporaneous media coverage, we find that the interaction of sustained mass disruption and worker–organizer intervention were the key mechanisms that allowed the teachers and their unions to reshape moral economies. Externally, the strikes created a social and political crisis to which political elites had to respond, while tying the teachers' struggles to broader community issues, galvanizing public support for the strikes. As disruptions escalated, the teachers' experience of collective action created a positive feedback effect, reshaping workers' understanding of what they wanted, what they deserved, and what they could win. The 2018 teachers' strike is analytically useful because it managed to reshape norms and expectations around educational and economic inequality rapidly, on a large scale.

The purpose of this paper is to relay and discuss the experiences of a teacher educator teaching critical literacy to preservice teacher candidates immediately following the US presidential election in 2016. In a time of increasing polarization in the USA, teachers and teacher educators have unique opportunities to create honest spaces for dialogue, but developing classrooms that can serve as these spaces is not an easy task.

This paper is a self-study practitioner narrative of a teacher educator teaching a secondary literacy course.

The paper discusses the importance of addressing critical literacy in the context of particular historical moments and as more sustained, engaged work that makes room for minority voices that may not be heard across particular settings. The findings prompt teachers and teacher educators to consider whose voices are present, absent and valued during difficult conversations.

Making room for uncomfortable dialogues in preservice teacher education classrooms can transform the ways in which teacher candidates (and their future students) engage with written and non-traditional texts in the world around them. Promoting spaces for critical, authentic and honest dialogue requires teacher educators to model the willingness to move beyond their own comfort zones and interrogate their own deeply help beliefs. This paper is evidence of engaged self-reflection, a necessary part of transformative practice related to critical literacy.

The objective of this chapter is to argue a case for the need to include teachers and professional educators in the policy making and implementation processes of the World Bank's Education Sector Strategy 2020. By drawing on evidence from the Consultation Plan, the chapter investigates how communicative practices about teachers are embedded in the discourse of the plan and how these influence the rationalisation of the policy. In doing so, the chapter will examine the relationships between social actions, systems rationalisation and life world rationalisation. Much like commercial and entrepreneurial organisations focus on the voice of the customer (VOC), that is on satisfying the stakeholders and end users in their processes, in this chapter, the voice of the teacher (VOT) is highlighted. The skills and knowledge of key stakeholders need to be leveraged and engaged in order to ensure that the policy achieves its desired aims. In order to frame this argument, notions of Habermas’ communicative action theory is used to show how policy engages in systems steering. Rather than understanding education strategy and reform as a process of engaging only government and policy makers, this chapter suggests that by engaging the practitioners and listening to the practical discourse around reform, teachers can be leaders of reforms rather than obfuscated agents.

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.

In this qualitative study, we explore 31 preservice teachers’ generative trajectories including how they built on instructional practices learned in the service-learning project, the university methods course, and the field-based experience. We addressed the question: In what ways does participating in a semester-long field-based university course combined with a service-learning program shape preservice teachers’ views about effective literacy practices for emergent bilinguals? We identified four themes in our analysis: importance of choice in literacy pedagogy; learning from and with our students; freedom to apply course methods and ideas; and growing confidence and align them with Ball’s (2009) generative change model and the four processes of change – metacognitive awareness, ideological becoming, internalization, and efficacy.

We found the preservice teachers’ ability to develop an awareness of diversity grew from their work with students both in their field-block experience and writing club. These opportunities provided them with a layering of learning – from course readings, collaborating with teachers, to problem solving and creating lessons that specifically met their students’ needs. By moving in and out of different contexts, preservice teachers developed generative knowledge about ways to support writing for emergent bilinguals. Likewise, they became keenly aware of their own experiences and beliefs. Implications include the importance of providing a variety of opportunities for preservice teachers to work directly with students. This should be accompanied by written and verbal discussions to examine and critique their experiences and ideologies in relation to students’ language and literacy needs.

In this article, we highlight ways in which disability critical race theory (DisCrit) (Annamma et al., 2013), inclusive education and community-based participatory research (CBPR) can be used within professional development schools (PDS) to provide students with disabilities with more access to inclusive classrooms. At a grade 4–6 elementary school, we developed a model of a critical PDS to promote inclusive education and facilitate the transition of students of color with disabilities from self-contained to inclusive classrooms. We conducted semi-structured interviews and used action plan meetings with school administrators, teachers, professionals and students with disabilities and their parents to assess the impact of our critical PDS model. Findings suggest this model had a positive impact on administrators’ and teachers’ critical consciousness, ideological and instructional practices, students of color with disabilities’ social, academic and personal outcomes, as well as a schoolwide culture of inclusion and social justice. This study can inform tailored professional development efforts to improve educators’ inclusive practices.

We conducted semi-structured interviews and used action plan meetings with school administrators, teachers, professionals and students with disabilities and their parents to assess the impact of our critical PDS model.

The findings of this study suggest this model had a positive impact on administrators’ and teachers’ critical consciousness, ideological and instructional practices, students of color with disabilities’ social, academic and personal outcomes, as well as a schoolwide culture of inclusion and social justice.

This study can inform tailored professional development efforts aiming to improve educators’ inclusive practices.

We developed a model of a critical PDS to promote inclusive education and facilitate the transition of students of color with disabilities from self-contained to inclusive classrooms.

This chapter traces the shift of many progressive educators from a general faith in special education to the more recent push for democratic and ethical inclusive education. This chapter examines the critical scholarship that propelled many educators away from systems of special education and into the inclusive education movement. Two phases in the development of inclusive education are described, an initial failed attempt often described by researchers as “integration,” and the current social movement building toward a more genuine social transformation of classrooms and schools.

The article aims at analyzing narratives discourses to project dialogic storying as relevant in a mode of narrative research in English language education.

As an English language teacher and researcher, the author adopts narrative analysis as the research method for doctoral study, so this article delves into narrative research methods, especially in the context of English language education. The author found various existing notions on narrative research from Clandinin and Connelly (2000) and Barkhuizen et al. (2014), who contend that narrative is a mode of processing experiences and events in the form of a story. The author corroborated various notions on narrative research in English language education as an argument that narratives can be a strong data source in English language educational research. Since it has been a research focus for English language educators, the author explored seven dissertations that were submitted to a Nepalese university in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

The article aims at analyzing narratives discourses to project dialogic storying as relevant in a mode of narrative research in English language education. While examining the dissertations, the author found that the subjective and ideological exploration of narratives is in practice; however, they need further in-depth analysis under a specific framing. The author argues that the concept of dialogic storying can be strong narrative research in English language education.

It has examined prospective applications of the dialogic storying process using dissertations submitted to a University in Nepal. In terms of conceptual discussions on narratives and narrative analysis, it is more interpretive.

It provides an initial framing to get into narrative research in English language education. It allows academics to go further into subjective and ideological inquiries in order to discuss more categorical elements in narrative research.

It is a more thematic and interpretive discussion so it discusses existing and appropriate practices in narrative research methods to defend the dialogic storying approach. It has not counter argued the existing knowledge; however, it provides insights to clarify dialogic storying as a research approach.