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…

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.

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 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…

In this article, I present six English teachers' perceptions of the dialogue used by principals and superintendents to communicate policy mandates in their schools. I wanted to learn about the ways in which the discourse employed by these two kinds of policymakers influenced English teachers' experiences as professionals and how these policies and…

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…

Educational researchers are accustomed to institutional review board (IRB) requirements (e.g., protecting participants) with students often identified as the only "vulnerable population" for IRB purposes. However, as practitioner research has gained more prominence, the vulnerability of teacher-researchers themselves has begun to surface. In this…

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…

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…

English teachers and educators of English teachers should work within rather than against the tensions present in their classrooms. For us, nothing could be more key. Until university teacher educators construct and enact classrooms that embrace the dialogical tensions and possibilities within those settings, new and veteran teachers in the…

The notion that "teachers of writing must also write" has been pervasive since the 1970s. But "what" should they write? In the National Writing Project (NWP), a professional network focused on the improvement of writing instruction and featuring summer institutes in which teachers engage in writing of their own as well as demonstrations of…

This article explores how the contexts of secondary English teaching in Ontario, Canada, interacted with one teacher's identity to produce teaching perspectives and practices that were monocultural in nature and limited in their multicultural and antiracist emphases. In doing so, the article contributes to educational research that explores the…

This past summer fifteen teachers from the Detroit public schools and the metro Detroit area participated in Wayne State University's first Invitational Summer Institute as part of the Wayne State Writing Project. As the director of a brand new National Writing Project site, the author was apprehensive about what she could expect from herself, the…

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…