Valerie Kinloch describes how the literacy narratives around place-making by Phillip, an African American teenager who resides in this historic community, demonstrate complexities of confronting power, struggle, and identity within an out-of-school community that is rapidly becoming gentrified. (Contains 3 notes.)

This article examines relationships among process, product, and playmaking in a southeastern playwriting and performance program for teen girls, Playmaking for Girls (PFG). The authors have chosen to focus on tensions between process and product. Such tensions are present in the challenges teachers experience when privileging student-centered…

In this article, the author explores the ways in which new teaching and learning geographies were crafted by adolescents and adults through the engagement and performance of multimodal literacy practices. They did so by communicating and representing knowledge through the manipulation of multiple expressive modalities, including pens for writing…

David E. Kirkland turns our attention to the ways tattoos can represent "human" stories of literacy through the power of inked flesh, the self-portrait it creates, and the words and worlds that surround the body. The body, for Kirkland, is an important site of cultural production that represents the transformative, political, and personal terrains…

The history between Cheektowaga Central and the University at Buffalo illustrates the benefits of forming long-term collaborative relationships between teacher education programs and local schools. In 1998, the author was approached by Suzanne Miller regarding the possibility of Meg Callahan, then a doctoral student at the University at Buffalo,…

Framed in theories of new literacies, this article presents the story of Carol, a ninth-grade English teacher, who constructed lessons around semiotic analysis and constructivist learning in multimodal formats as an integral part of her instruction. Her students constructed identities as more competent, literate beings through guided participation…

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…

Finding a way to integrate authentic learning experiences and explicit instruction is essential if teachers are to adapt to the current policy environment while at the same time acknowledging the rights of students to determine their own goals for literacy learning. Toward this end, the author presents a case study of one student's development as…

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…

Intrigued by the paths by which K-12 classroom teachers come to publish articles about their work, Anne Whitney undertook a project to clarify the extent and character of contributions classroom teachers have made to three journals that have become the standard-bearers for scholarship directly applicable to language arts classrooms: "Language…

In 2005 we began a comprehensive review of every article published in "English Journal" on the topics of poetry and its teaching since its first issue in 1912. Did high school English teachers and college professors in 1914 or 1945 or 1963 see the teaching of poetry as we see it today? Did they have similar problems and concerns? Is the sense of…

This article looks at a research partnership between a high school English teacher and a university teacher educator, focusing on the impact of their work of co-teaching two integrated courses in the university's teacher education program. Findings from a study conducted during their third year of working together were used to revise the course…

In a longitudinal, cross-disciplinary study of teachers' experiences with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification process in Georgia, discourse related to the notion of performance surfaced in the data in a variety of ways. A poststructural perspective suggests an explanation for how teacher performances are…

This article discusses a professional development text by Ruby Payne that claims to inform teachers about the lives and minds of children from poor households. We use Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Gee, 2005; Rogers, Malancharuvil-Berkes, & Mosley, 2005) to examine how the author enlists readers' participation in deficit discourses…

This life history study focuses on a group of European-American, female preservice teachers and how they have learned literacy across contexts within their lives. Specifically, I examined these teachers' "literacy stories" or stories they told about their own learning to read, write, and interpret texts, looking closely at how they used narrative…