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…

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 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…

School is sometimes framed as a place for preparing, a place for becoming college and career ready. At times this approach positions school as an important space "within" the world of college and careers, envisioned perhaps as Dewey imagined it, as a safe place to try things, a space where real work of participation in society could be done but in…

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…

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…

English as taught in city schools does not always reflect the Englishes city students travel with. Their urban English landscape is enriched by a procession of many voices that march in various directions in, around, and through the monuments of the city. These languages--Englishes, in this case--which have been traded on through various public…

When someone uses the term "standards," one tends to assume the topic under discussion is K-12 education, but standards for teacher preparation have their own parallel history. In English teacher education, that history has two strands: the NCTE Guidelines for the Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts, which predate the "standards…

This article explores one element of collaborative practice: the integration of English language learner-focused instruction and discussion in a secondary English methods course. Drawing on the authors' expertise, they examine revisions made to a secondary English methods course to better address the academic and individual needs of diverse…

Although there is a significant body of work related to overall teacher attrition and mobility, little research has been conducted that is specifically related to English teachers. Given the predominance of high-stakes reading and writing assessments for middle and high school students, studying those who teach literacy is critical for a better…

Preservice teachers often enter English language arts teacher preparation courses with untapped fears of writing and teaching writing due to null or bad experiences as K-12 students. In this article, I follow two preservice elementary teachers through a semester long methods course and reveal how they developed positive, clear images of themselves…

Suzanne Miller examines the meaning of shifting notions of literacy for English education, drawing on her work in a long-term digital video composing project and in an ELA teacher education class to look at teachers' engagements with this newly accessible multimodal literacy practice. She argues that English teachers need support for new kinds of…