For the "Extending the Conversation" section in this issue, the authors invited English educators from the United States and abroad to reflect on the state of English education in their countries. All five contributors have interacted through their participation in the NCTE Annual Convention, the CEE summer summits, the International…

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 qualitative study reveals the ways in which reading and reflecting on two counter-narrative young adult novels fostered opportunities for preservice English teachers to think more acutely about their understandings of race within and beyond the text. Participants expressed feelings of empathy with and connection to characters whose cultural…

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…

In this article, service learning is explored as a pedagogical third space from which preservice teachers learn to teach the New English education. We argue that such a space has the potential to foster preservice English teachers' understanding of their role and identity as future teachers and how this identity is always relative to the students…

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 argues that ELA teacher candidates and inservice ELA teachers need historical perspectives in their coursework and their practice. Using the life and career of Lou LaBrant, the author examines the value of placing current practice in the context of practice throughout the history of the field of teaching ELA. Patterns examined in…

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…

In this article, a group of inservice providers and beginning researchers describe their experiences in learning to conduct evaluation research on a long-term school-university partnership program. We offer the practical lessons we learned in how to undertake such a study, and we share the immediate and powerful effects that the process of…

In this article, the author emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the "hard stuff" of life in literacy classrooms. She considers how difficult experiences--exposed wounds and the "exposing" of wounds--function in literacy classrooms. She is particularly interested in how such experiences, as they enter the public spaces of schools and…

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…

The author shares his experiences teaching a unit based on the Broadway musical "In the Heights" as a way of engaging the cultural identity of his students, mainly Dominican Americans. The unit he created around the musical was initially built in an effort to make Dominican culture overt in the classroom, fulfilling pedagogical ideas…