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.

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…

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…

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…

English educators at all levels have endeavored to understand difference in their classrooms both in terms of the content that they teach and in terms of the social and cultural identities of students in their classrooms. However, although educators have come a long way in understanding identity as it is constituted by race and gender, much work…

This article examines the outcomes of an eight-month professional development initiative, designed to support six Writing Project teachers' classroom inquiry projects, each focused on improving an aspect of student writing. We begin by introducing the genesis of these classroom research projects as well as the structure and content of the support…

This article explores how secondary English preservice teachers reason about their future students and the consequences these systems of reasoning have for their thinking about pedagogy and their roles as teachers. By examining these systems of reasoning, this article helps to denaturalize normalized discourses about adolescence--discourses that…

This article reports a study of a university supervisor and a preservice English language arts teacher as they worked collaboratively within two different field experience sites to develop a conceptual understanding of instructional scaffolding. An analysis of classroom observations and mentoring conversations was conducted to examine how the…

This longitudinal case study follows one high school English teacher's path of concept development over a two-year period encompassing her student teaching and first year of full-time teaching, both at the same rural school in the southeastern United States. The authors use a sociocultural theoretical framework emerging from the work of Vygotsky…

This article explores how exposure to aesthetic education approaches can help novice teachers reconsider their literature instruction in an age of mandated curricula and increased pressures to "teach to the test." The guiding questions were as follows: What similarities exist between transacting with a text on the page and aesthetically engaging…

In this article a team of English teachers and teacher educators reflect on both their involvement with the photovoice project Through Students' Eyes (TSE) and on the photographic and written data of their students' perspectives on school. After working with hundreds of youth involved with TSE for most of the past decade, they consider why they…

This article examines the construction of an intercultural critical literacy practice in a Web-based discussion forum as one way to globalize interpretive practices within the English classroom. English education students in the United States and Sweden discussed a short story over a period of three weeks. The analysis of the students' postings…

Joseph O. Milner explores a narrowing of differences between English teacher educators and classroom teachers. Using North Carolina as a national barometer for his action research, Milner cites the shifting attitudes of classroom teachers toward the shared values of English teacher educators, and he opens the door for similar research projects in…

Delane Bender-Slack takes on the important subject of teaching for social justice. Her article's strength is in its uncompromising look at complex, often misinterpreted teaching challenges. This article focuses on actual teachers working for social justice in their classrooms. Working from a strong theoretical framework, she pushes us in new…