In this article, the authors--the teacher educators who obtained a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVD)--explore what it meant for teachers and teacher educators involved in the PorTRAIT (Practitioner or Teacher Researchers As Inquiring Travelers) program to enlarge their views of teacher research and their own classrooms by being…

Analyzing the creation of a digital portfolio from a digital and visual rhetorical stance, rather than from a standards-based or technical competency position, affords a teacher many more opportunities to think critically about their work, understand the choices they are making in representing that work online to diverse audiences, and continually…

The educational enterprise is awash in standards, but little attention is paid to what the term really means. Without carefully crafted, widely accepted definitions of standards, standards projects are rife with problems and frequently fail. The absence of careful definitions typically leads to confusion, rejection of standards, and can actually…

The work of the Commission on Gender, Race, and Class in Teacher Education Programs is grounded in the belief that it is impossible to make sense of the field of English education without using gender, race, and class as central categories of description and analysis. Rather, gender, race, and class are basic to the study and understanding of the…

Schooling, which is shared to the extent that Americans share no other cultural or institutional experience, is perhaps the single greatest influence on how people understand the world around them and their places in it. English instruction, required as it is throughout formal schooling, constitutes perhaps the most powerful vehicle for shaping…

In this article, the author examines briefly several broad themes in reading reform to see what these can tell about policy makers' respect--or lack of respect--for teachers of reading. He talks about the current discourse of "scientifically-based" research which is about teachers, teachers who are blamed for reading failures. He discusses teacher…

In this article, the author discusses the importance of questioning in understanding teaching practice and the possibilities of inquiry in English education. The author has come to believe that the most important thing everyone can do in the field of English education is to support teachers in establishing a questioning stance that will evolve…

What English educators call "praxis," the intersections between theory and practice, remains the most viable theory for literacy teachers at all levels, and Paulo Freire, the educator who explained "praxis" to them, remains their most important source of philosophical inspiration. Freire's definition of "praxis," that it requires action and…

Several years ago the author attended a week-long orientation for a new job she was taking as an English teacher in an affluent suburb of Chicago. On the first day, the school's director of student activities led all of the new teachers in an "icebreaker," wherein they were taught how to juggle. However, the author could not juggle. When it was…

In this article, the authors focus on how Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) matter to English language arts and literacy education. To get a sense of history related to technology in the English classroom, they pursue two interwoven strands: (1) the concept of multiliteracies and common perceptions of technology in teacher education…

Language is foundational to all learning. Whether it is the medium for the communication of our thoughts or whether it comes from the texts we consume and produce, there is little doubt that we are constructed and we construct ourselves through language. For these reasons and more, the most important participants in our most important institutions…

In the two high school writing communities described in this article, literacy is strategic, purposeful, and always linked to meaning. The foundation for literate practices in these communities is Freirian in nature. Teachers, in a very serious way, work to liberate language and prepare students to be in control of words; they do this by allowing…

The art of spoken word has captured youthful spirits all over the country, especially in heterogeneous urban centers. In this essay, the author opens up for re-consideration a central issue in language arts education, one suggested by the very writing of spoken word: how educators think about the relationship between oral and written language and…

In this essay, the author argues for a democratized way of developing a consciousness of differences by describing two abbreviated creative writing classroom experiences with urban sixth grade middle school students during the 2002-2003 academic year. She draws on Tony Medina's (2001) claim that poetry and writing weave people and worlds together…

June Jordan, a prolific and most-published African American essayist and poet and a professor in the African American Studies department at the University of California, Berkeley, ventured to challenge the institutionalized Ivory Tower traditions and subsequently established a university program called Poetry for the People (P4P) in 1991. Such…