The authors consider how preservice teachers and teacher educators might broaden their operating notions of experience and practicality to help one another access a wider range of sources of knowledge for their teaching.

This case study follows a teacher candidate through her semester of student teaching English in a suburban high school in the U.S. Southeast. The study is part of a line of inquiry that investigates the factors that contribute to teachers' development of "concepts" to guide their instruction. In particular, this research focuses on…

This article examines student teachers' investigations of issues related to writing pedagogy, response, and evaluation in an English methods course, including their use of descriptive review of student writing (Carini, 2001) to analyze adolescents' work collaboratively. Beginning with an examination of prevailing understandings of…

Within the field of writing teacher education, scholars and practitioners agree that effective writing instructors (at both the P--12 and postsecondary levels) are not simply cognizant of composition pedagogies, rhetorical theories, and their students' unique learning needs. Effective writing instructors also regularly…

Discussions of urban fiction and multicultural literature hold great potential for transforming the practice of beginning English teachers in diverse school settings. In this article, the authors, both teacher educators of color, present two case studies of preparing middle- and secondary-level English educators from a diversities perspective.…

This article describes an adolescent's development of multiliterate and multilingual writing practices and identities. It further explores how a literacy teacher enacted a writing pedagogy of multiliteracies that assisted the youth in building writing practices and identities. Data include interviews of the young woman and her teacher,…

In recent years the field of literacy education and research has seen an increased attention to disciplinary literacy instruction--the teaching of discipline-specific and valued ways of reading, writing, knowing, and communicating knowledge. This article is about disciplinary literacy, specifically disciplinary reading as it is understood by…

This article extends the conversation on English education as preparation for democratic participation. The author journeys through a cycle of action research, analyzing one classroom case study to improve her practice of curricular negotiation in a methods of teaching writing course.

A set of especially complicated ethical relationships becomes visible in literary study when the unspeakable atrocity of state-sponsored genocide is part of the story, as it is in many wartime texts taught in secondary English classrooms. What then is the nature of an English teacher's obligation to the detailed particularity of the past and…

This article describes a writing partnership that involved university preservice teachers and ninth grade students enrolled in an integrated social studies/language arts class. While the high school students found the experience exciting and satisfying, the preservice teachers expressed anxieties and concerns as they endeavored to foster academic…

In this article, we address how websites intended for ELA teachers encourage user participation and what kinds of English education these sites promote or exclude. We selected sites based on assumptions drawn from interactional sociolinguistics as well as additional criteria that developed during our search. Our analysis focuses on the George…

We offer this article to support ELA and other subject-area teachers as they think about why disciplinary literacy teaching is important and how to enact it in robust ways. We argue that it is critical for the improvement of students' academic literacy development and overall learning that all teachers and literacy researchers attend to the…

In this article, we argue that preservice teachers have limited experience reading and writing poetry, and that if they are to teach poetry in meaningful ways to their future students, they need to have compelling experiences with poetry in teacher education--ones that take into account their former experiences and incoming dispositions and that…

This critical ethnographic study explores how two teacher candidates in English education used specific and varied literacy practices to enact their social justice priorities at a troubled high school in a high-need district. Data include interviews before and after the student teaching experience; observations of teaching, blogs, journals, and…

This article presents the author's keynote address from the 2011 CEE Summer Conference at Fordham University in which he challenges educators to rethink what they do and how they do it. He talks about English teacher education as literacy teacher education. He tries to sketch a picture of the status quo and its limits, and an alternative picture…