bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Developing Understandings of Race: Preservice Teachers’ Counter-Narrative (Re)Constructions of People of Color in Young Adult Literature
Authors: Glenn Wendy J.
Published: March 2024

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 realities are different from their own. This emphasis on the universal human condition and transcendent power of literature suggests the potential of counter-narrative literature to allow participants to connect with characters across lines of difference. In addition, participants provided evidence of how the counter-narratives encouraged them to reconsider assumptions that society and they hold and perpetuate relative to people of color. The texts offered readers a new way in which to reconceptualize societal norms to reconsider how they see the seeming “other” and, in some cases, recognize their own culpability in promoting existing stereotypes. Finally, the counter-narrative texts heightened participants’ awareness of Whiteness, the ways in which race can privilege or limit by fostering insider or outsider status, and the discomfort that can result when such dichotomies define our identities. Findings illuminate the complexities inherent in the development of understandings of race among preservice teachers and reveal a richer understanding of preservice teachers’ development of knowledge related to the educational needs of students of color and their attitudes toward these students in and out of the classroom.
Negotiating the Rub between Cultures: Teacher Talk and Sustained Shifts in Practice
Authors: Matthews Meth Jessica , Azano Amy
Published: March 2024

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 program, consisting of seven two-hour sessions between October 2009 and April 2010. Data consisted of observations of these sessions and teacher interviews. We report the successes and challenges of this learning community in supporting teachers’ professional growth. Findings uncover the barriers participants faced while working toward classroom inquiry goals and suggest the importance of community, critical, structured discussion, and active problem solving in developing teachers’ confidence. We close by discussing the implications of this study for professional development in schools.
Extending the Conversation: English Teachers, Administrators, and Dialogue: Transcending the Asymmetry of Power in the Discourse of Educational Policy
Authors: Thomas Stewart Trevor
Published: March 2024

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 the language used to convey them influenced the teachers’ autonomy and their instructional decisions. I found that these teachers perceived that policymakers employed an authoritative discourse (Bakhtin 1981, 1986a) that made it difficult for them to engage in dialogue with the policy mandates they received. Bowe, Ball, and Gold (1992) characterized policy as a discourse that functions as “a set of claims about how the world should and might be, a matter of the authoritative allocation of values” (p. 370). I foreground the voices of secondary English teachers to generate dialogue focused on reconceptualizing the nature of policy discourse in U.S. schools.
Opening the Conversation: With Whom Might We Partner? For What Ends? In What Contexts? With What Reach?
Authors: Rush Leslie S. , Scherff Lisa , Davis Ashley L. , Pearce Becky
Published: March 2024

In this editorial, we asked two experienced English teachers to provide responses to the two research articles in this issue. In this way, all of the pieces in the issue point to the importance of collaboration for different stakeholders in English teacher preparation.
“Anything Could Happen”: Managing Uncertainty in an Academic Writing Partnership
Authors: DiPardo Anne , Staley Sara , Selland Makenzie , Martin Adam , Gniewek Olivia
Published: March 2024

This article describes a writing partnership that involved university preservice teachers and ninthgradestudents enrolled in an integrated social studies/language arts class. While the high schoolstudents found the experience exciting and satisfying, the preservice teachers expressed anxietiesand concerns as they endeavored to foster academic literacies. We conclude with reflections onthe challenges of preparing a new generation of English educators to teach writing in rich andmeaningful ways where they have not themselves benefited from such experiences in their own “apprenticeships of observation.”
“Starting with What Is”: Exploring Response and Responsibility to Student Writing through Collaborative Inquiry
Authors: Simon Rob
Published: March 2024

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 writing assessment and common instructional models in schools, the article explores critical inquiry–based approaches. This research documents how collaborative investigations encouraged student teachers to explore meaning and intentionality in student writing and to regard students as authors with intentionality and purpose. Findings substantiate adolescents’ and student teachers’ intellectual and experiential resources, suggesting how these can be a foundation for expanding conceptions and practices related to writing pedagogy, assessment, inquiry-based teaching, and teacher education.
Competing Centers of Gravity: A Beginning English Teacher’s Socialization Process within Conflictual Settings
Authors: Smagorinsky Peter , Rhym Darren , Moore Cynthia P.
Published: March 2024

This case study follows a teacher candidate through her semester of student teaching English in a suburban high school in the U.S. Southeast. The study is part of a line of inquiry that investigates the factors that contribute to teachers’ development of concepts to guide their instruction. In particular, this research focuses on the mediational role of settings in teachers’ development of a teaching conception and the attributions made by the teacher candidate to the sources for her understanding of how to teach. Data for the research consist of observations and interviews with focal teacher Anita and key stakeholders. These data were analyzed to identify the pedagogical tools used during student teaching and the sources to which she attributed her learning of them. Findings indicate that Anita’s initial conception of teaching was complicated by competing centers of gravity—that is, settings with conflicting notions of effective practice—that pulled her in many different directions, thus making her ability to develop a coherent approach to teaching a challenge. The study concludes with a discussion of conventional linear views of concept development and how attention to the settings of learning to teach can help explain the difficulties of learning to teach in cohesive and consistent ways.
Extending the Conversation: Experience Over All: Preservice Teachers and the Prizing of the “Practical”
Authors: Whitney Anne Elrod , Olan Elsie L. , Fredricksen James E.
Published: March 2024

The authors consider how preservice teachers and teacher educators might broaden their operating notions of experience and practicality to help one another access a wider range of sources of knowledge for their teaching.
Opening the Conversation: Thinking Deeper about Text Selection
Authors: Rush Leslie S. , Scherff Lisa , Martorana Christine Maddox
Published: March 2024

Editors Leslie Rush and Lisa Scherff, along with graduate student Christine Maddox Martorana, discuss issues related to text selection and introduce the articles in this issue.
Supernovas and Superheroes: Examining Unfamiliar Genres and Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge
Authors: Bentley Erinn
Published: March 2024

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 participate—themselves—in the practice of writing. As Tom Romano (2007) explains, “Those who teach a craft ought to do a craft. When teachers of writing write, particularly in the genres they teach, they develop their insider knowledge” (p. 171). Realistically, many inservice English language arts teachers do not have an extensive amount of time to write, reflect on their writing, and translate their “insider knowledge” into pedagogical practices. One place where this type of writing-teaching reflection and development may occur, however, is in the postsecondary classroom. This article describes a graduate-level methods course, in which middle-grades and secondary-level ELA teachers completed two projects focused on analyzing, composing, and teaching an unfamiliar genre. This study extends current research regarding the use of unfamiliar genres to improve students’ writing proficiencies (Bastian, 2010; Beckelhimer, 2011; Fleischer & Andrew-Vaughan, 2006, 2009) by adapting these projects to a new group of writers: inservice ELA teachers. Using a qualitative research design, this study draws upon Grossman’s (1990) theoretical framework, and pedagogical content knowledge to name and define four specific ways in which the course’s unfamiliar genre projects promoted teachers’ “insider knowledge” as writers, thus affecting their beliefs and practices for teaching writing.
Extending the Conversation: The Ethics of Teaching Disturbing Pasts: Reader Response, Historical Contextualization, and Rhetorical (Con)Textualization of Holocaust Texts in English
Authors: Juzwik Mary M.
Published: March 2024

A set of especially complicated ethical relationships becomes visible in literary study when the unspeakable atrocity of state-sponsored genocide is part of the story, as it is in many wartime texts taught in secondary English classrooms. What then is the nature of an English teacher’s obligation to the detailed particularity of the past and to those who endured that past whenencouraging students’ individual and collaborative responses to texts in the present (or in the future)? I explore the broad ethical question by discussing specific difficulties presented by the case of Holocaust pedagogy. The guiding purpose of the discussion is to explore a set of more general questions about the ethical dimensions of literary engagement in English—and specifically engagement with texts about disturbing pasts.
Building Multiliterate and Multilingual Writing Practices and Identities
Authors: Skerrett Allison
Published: March 2024

This article describes an adolescent’s development of multiliterate and multilingual writing practices and identities. It further explores how a literacy teacher enacted a writing pedagogy of multiliteracies that assisted the youth in building writing practices and identities. Data include interviews of the young woman and her teacher, classroom observations, and literacy artifacts produced and used by the adolescent. These data are analyzed using theories of identity, positioning, communities of practice, and multiliteracies. Findings include that the youth developed her writing practices and identities over time and across multiple contexts of multiliterate and multilingual practices. Within and across these communities, the dimensions of apprenticeship, positioning, and recruitment of multiliterate and multilingual repertoires were essential to the youth’s development of writing practices and identities. These dimensions were also central to the literacy teacher’s enactment of a writing pedagogy of multiliteracies. The article asserts that attending to the processes through which young people develop their multiliterate and multilingual repertoires and identities can assist educators in creating supportive literacy environments for youth. It offers recommendations for literacy scholars and educators in this regard.
Embodying English: Performing and Positioning the White Teacher in a High School English Class
Authors: Johnson Elisabeth
Published: March 2024

Recent research and theoretical work on whiteness in teaching highlights reific, monolithic discourses that position white teachers as deficient, resistant, naive, and ignorant. I seek to complicate similar reductive portrayals through a two-year case of one high school teacher’s racial identities and subjectivities in and beyond the English classroom. Drawing on post-structural performance theories of identity and subjectivity, I pinpoint the material and sociopolitical forces that constrainthe white teaching body and reorient attention to the power of people in daily motion: subverting, making themselves known in multiple ways, always and already becoming. This performative perspective may provide productive lenses for white teachers in antiracist higher education who support teachers living and working in white skin.
Enacting High Leverage Practices in English Methods: The Case of Discussion
Authors: Williamson Peter
Published: March 2024

Though literature discussions are a commonplace feature of English classrooms, we know little about how teachers learn to facilitate classroom talk. Research on methods courses reveals little about how, or if, teachers are prepared to enact the “high leverage” practice of literature discussions. This qualitative study examines an English methods unit on discussion and the practices that the novices later enacted in the field. Sociocultural theory is used to analyze how the novices’enacted particular features of discussions and how these activities afforded them opportunities to practice the facilitative roles that teachers play. The findings suggest that the novices had difficulty understanding their roles as teachers in student-centered activities, and that teacher educators must curricularize enactments to help novices learn what teachers actually do when enacting high leverage practices like discussions.
Opening the Conversation: Teacher Evaluations That Improve Teacher Practice
Authors: Rush Leslie S. , Scherff Lisa
Published: March 2024

The editors introduce the content of this issue.
Extending the Conversation: Learning from Our Youngest Writers: Preservice Teachers in Primary Classes
Authors: Mulligan Roark , Dawson Kay
Published: March 2024

Authors Roark Mulligan and Kay Dawson describe a project in which preservice teachers worked in primary grade classrooms, focusing on mentoring young children in writing. In spite of the authors’ initial fears that preservice teachers would find these experiences irrelevant, the authors found that the preservice teachers “witnessed a rapidity of development that could not be observed on any other grade level.”
Extending the Conversation: Authentic Teacher Evaluation: A Two-Tiered Proposal for Formative and Summative Assessment
Authors: Smagorinsky Peter
Published: March 2024

Peter Smagorinsky presents a new proposal for teacher evaluation in his article. His suggestion is quite appropriate for our times: “Assessing teachers according to what effective teachers do, rather than according to which assessment means are most cost-effective and most amenable to reduction to single scores, seems appropriate.”
Speaking My Mind: con·cis·if·y (kən-sīs-əf-ī): v. To make concise.
Authors: Mitchell Richard A.
Published: March 2024

“Speaking My Mind” invites readers to speak out about controversial issues relevant to the teaching of English language arts.
Building Fantasy Worlds Together with Collaborative Writing: Creative, Social, and Pedagogic Challenges
Authors: Rish Ryan M. , Caton Joshua
Published: March 2024

An assignment inspired by fanfiction encourages students to create collaboratively designed fantasy worlds.
Tiered Texts: Supporting Knowledge and Language Learning for English Learners and Struggling Readers
Authors: Moss Barbara , Lapp Diane , O’Shea Mary
Published: March 2024

Using snippets of engaging classroom dialogue, the authors highlight the value of teaching complex literary works by reading several texts at increasing levels of difficulty.
Two Voice Poem: A Conversation with Writers on Writing
Authors: Leigh S. Rebecca , Cramer Ron
Published: March 2024

In a unique format, the authors reference more than 30 well-known writers to raise issues about composition and teaching writing.
Challenging Texts: Teaching Deliberately: Reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
Authors: Thomas P. L. , Davis Andrea
Published: March 2024

Challenging Texts explores various ways of teaching literary theory to high school and middle school students.
Innovative Writing Instruction: When It Happens “Across”: Writing as Transformative and Expansive
Authors: Kinloch Valerie
Published: March 2024

Innovative Writing Instruction publishes new approaches to the teaching of writing in high school and middle school.
EJ Extra: A Snapshot of Writing Instruction in Middle Schools and High Schools [FREE ACCESS]
Authors: Applebee Arthur N. , Langer Judith A.
Published: March 2024

In the May 2009 issue of English Journal, we reported on our analysis of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to provide a first look at changes in the teaching of writing over the past 30 years. In this article, we provide a more detailed look, drawing on data collected from visits to 260 English, math, social studies, and science classrooms in 20 middle schools and high schools in five states (schools all chosen for reputations for excellence in the teaching of writing), interviews with 220 teachers and administrators, and with 138 students in these schools, and a national survey of 1520 randomly selected teachers.
Speaking My Mind: Namaste: A Spiritual Approach to Grading
Authors: Cotton Christopher
Published: March 2024

“Speaking My Mind” invites readers to speak out about controversial issues relevant to the teaching of English language arts.
An Ethical Dilemma: Talking about Plagiarism and Academic Integrity in the Digital Age
Authors: Thomas Ebony Elizabeth , Sassi Kelly
Published: March 2024

How can we help students avoid plagiarism? Don’t lecture them. Talk with them.
Classrooms That Discourage Plagiarism and Welcome Technology
Authors: Pearson Nancy Guillot
Published: March 2024

Sure, some technology may make cheating easier. But harnessing technology well can keep students from wanting to cheat.
Framing the Text: Using Storyboards to Engage Students with Reading
Authors: Bruce David L.
Published: March 2024

Students will draw more than conclusions from these complex activities that use students’ visual and artistic skills to critically examine literature and film.
Mentoring Matters: Many Voices, Many Choices: Women Who Mentored and Inspired Dana Rodriguez
Authors: Powell Mary G.
Published: March 2024

Mentoring Matters focuses on effective ways to support new English teachers and student teachers.
Off the Shelves: Looking for Answers to Big Questions: Religion in Current Young Adult Literature
Authors: Letcher Mark
Published: March 2024

Off the Shelves discusses new young adult literature and explores ways of teaching YA texts in middle and high school English classes.
From the Secondary Section: Three Things I Know for Sure [FREE ACCESS]
Authors: Ochoa Jennifer
Published: March 2024

The author reflects on what she's learned in twenty years of teaching.
Sixty Years of Language Arts Education: Looking Back in Order to Look Forward [FREE ACCESS]
Authors: Goodman Yetta M.
Published: March 2024

Beginning in the 1950s and going to the present, the writer traces the intersection of her teaching career and movements in literacy education.
Buckle Up for Interesting Times
Authors: Myers Miles
Published: March 2024

The past informs the present as this former NCTE Executive Director recounts the history of the creation of the standards and the involvement of the organization in politicaland government initiatives.
The Living Library of NCTE [FREE ACCESS]
Authors: Appleman Deborah
Published: March 2024

The author offers an appreciation of the writers and their books that have shaped her teaching and thinking.
What Makes a Teaching Moment: Spheres of Influence in Professional Activity [FREE ACCESS]
Authors: Bomer Randy
Published: March 2024

Using a reading conference with a student as a springboard, the author details the influence of the NCTE professional community on his teaching.
Sustaining NCTE Values [FREE ACCESS]
Authors: Logan Shirley Wilson
Published: March 2024

Three of NCTE’s core values are writing, diversity, and advocacy.
Good Things Come to Those Who Attend the NCTE Annual Convention
Authors: Hinton KaaVonia
Published: March 2024

The Cultivating New Voices program made a significant difference in this member’s life.
Recollections of a “Reclaiming the Dream” Conference
Authors: Perry Jesse
Published: March 2024

A former NCTE president details the relevance of a past conference.
Rhetorical Listening: When the Eye Defers to the Ear for Civic Discourse
Authors: Middleton Joyce Irene
Published: March 2024

The author connects the rhetorical research of three scholars whose work underscores NCTE’s growing interest in rhetorical listening and civic discourse.
Of Kin and Community [FREE ACCESS]
Authors: Villanueva Victor
Published: March 2024

The author found a personal community in his professional organization.
Early Childhood Education Assembly: Changing the Face of Early Literacy Education within NCTE and Beyond
Authors: Souto-Manning Mariana , Vasquez Vivian M.
Published: March 2024

Early childhood educators established a place in NCTE to support literacy work with young children.
From the Secondary Section: Reading and Writing with Purpose: In and Out of School
Authors: Atkins Janet
Published: March 2024

Members of the Secondary Section Steering Committee comment on topics of importance to English language arts educators.
Creative and Critical Engagement: Constructing a Teen Vision of the World
Authors: DiMarzio Erica , Dippre Ryan
Published: March 2024

Two high school teachers and their students collaborate on student-written and student edited anthologies of creative writing.
“I Can’t Believe We Read This Whole Book!” How Reading for Their Own Purposes Affected Struggling Teens
Authors: Smith Carol A. , Scuilli Suzanne
Published: March 2024

A classroom teacher and a literacy coach describe how a student’s attempt to derail a lesson became an opportunity to design a student-directed curriculum based on highlighting students’ purposes for reading and writing.
“Signs of Life” in the High School Classroom: Analyzing Popular Culture to Provide Student Choice in Analytical Writing [FREE ACCESS]
Authors: Falkner Shannon
Published: March 2024

Falkner offers a user-friendly approach to semiotics that engages students in critical examination of popular culture they’re already immersed in.
Purpose beyond Their Years: Students Analyze Future Genres
Authors: Beckelhimer Lisa
Published: March 2024

Using an examination of comics as a model, students are exposed to genre analysis, examining forms of writing they are likely to encounter in their future professions.
Twenty-First-Century Adolescents, Writing, and New Media: Meeting the Challenge with Game Controllers and Laptops
Authors: Gerber Hannah R. , Price Debra P.
Published: March 2024

The authors provide suggestions for using popular video games to engage students in authentic expository, persuasive, and creative writing.
Mentoring Matters: Teaching English as a Subversive Activity: Advice for New Teachers
Authors: McCann Thomas M.
Published: March 2024

Mentoring Matters focuses on effective ways to support new English teachers and student teachers.
Speaking My Mind: Confronting Bullying: It Really Can Get Better
Authors: Henkin Roxanne
Published: March 2024

“Speaking My Mind” invites readers to speak out about controversial issues relevant to the teaching of English language arts.
Teacher to Teacher: What Literature Fosters the Examination of Bullying Behaviors?
Authors: Childers Katina D. , Consalvo Annamary
Published: March 2024

“Teacher to Teacher” provides a forum for teachers to share ideas, materials, and activities.
A.S. King and C. J. Bott Talk about Bullying
Authors: King A.S. , Bott C. J.
Published: March 2024

Listen in on a conversation about bullying between a young adult author and an expert on bullying.
Beyond Bullying: Pairing Classics and Media Literacy
Authors: Johnson Angela Beumer , Augustus Linda , Agiro Christa Preston
Published: March 2024

Students resist media manipulation by making connections to Othello.
Long-Term Effects of Bullying: Promoting Empathy with Nonfiction
Authors: Ansbach Jennifer
Published: March 2024

Students’ empathy increases after responding to essays from Dear Bully.
Mentoring Matters: It’s Just Like Dido Said: Improving the Experiences of International Teaching Colleagues
Authors: McCann Thomas M. , Salas Spencer , Kissau Scott
Published: March 2024

Mentoring Matters focuses on effective ways to support new English teachers and student teachers.
Professional Writing in the English Classroom: Are You a Writing Bully? Considerations for Teachers and Students
Authors: Bush Jonathan , Zuidema Leah
Published: March 2024

Professional Writing in the English Classroom publishes articles about teaching students to write effectively in the genres, conventions, and visual designs required for professional contexts and related rhetorical situations.
High School Matters: Literacy Is More Than Books and Pens
Authors: Small Roseboro Anna J.
Published: March 2024

Members of the Secondary Section Steering Committee comment on topics of importance to English language arts educators.
Making Characters Come Alive: Using Characters for Identification and Engagement
Authors: Chadwick Jocelyn A.
Published: March 2024

Alienation and derived identity form the basis for several activities that can encourage adolescents to connect with works by Amy Tan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston,and Sandra Cisneros.
The Quest of Father and Son: Illuminating Character Identity, Motivation, and Conflict in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Authors: Gilbert Chris
Published: March 2024

A post-apocalyptic novel provides the impetus for discussions of literature, love, and what people really need.
Teaching Classic Literature with Comic Books and Virtual Lit Trips
Authors: Sardone Nancy B.
Published: March 2024

Sardone’s suggested activities can really take students places!
Success with ELLs: Developing Collaborative Systems for Learning
Authors: DelliCarpini Margo , Cacicio Sarah
Published: March 2024

Success with ELLs suggests effective approaches to teaching English language learners in ways that can be of benefit to all students in mainstream middle and high school English classes.
High School Matters: “These words are not mine”: Are We Still Teaching Literature When We Use Adaptations?
Authors: LoMonico Michael
Published: March 2024

Members of the Secondary Section Steering Committee comment on topics of importance to English language arts educators.
Using a Prop Box to Create Emotional Memory and Creative Play for Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello
Authors: Dulan Margaret A.
Published: March 2024

Dulaney’s approach to teaching Shakespeare is really outside the box!
Be Here Now: Young Women’s War Diaries and the Practice of Intentionality
Authors: Wahlstrom Ralph L.
Published: March 2024

When written for the public, diaries can be dramatic tools for making social change.
“I guess I do know a good story”: Re-envisioning Writing Process with Native American Students and Communities
Authors: Stanton Christine Rogers , Sutton Karl
Published: March 2024

Photovoice Stories and Elder Interviews provide fascinating opportunities for students to improve their writing skills and get involved in their community.
The Fight’s Not Always Fixed: Using Literary Response to Transcend Standardized Test Scores
Authors: Ávila JuliAnna
Published: March 2024

Ávila uses the writing of three eleventh-grade students to show how they are developing literacy identities far superior to their standardized test ratings.
Reframing Resistance in the English Classroom
Authors: Vetter Amy , Reynolds Jeanie , Beane Heather , Roquemore Katie , Rorrer Amanda , Katie Shepherd-Allred
Published: March 2024

Is student resistance desirable?
Reluctantly Recognizing Resistance: An Analysis of Representations of Critical Literacy in English Journal
Authors: Petrone Robert , Bullard Lisa
Published: March 2024

Following a study of recent English Journal articles, the authors call for more acknowledgment of the reality of and the role of student resistance in professional articles about teaching English.
Mentoring Matters: Mentoring Preservice and Early-Career English Teachers in Online Environments
Authors: Rodesiler Luke , Tripp Lauren
Published: March 2024

Mentoring Matters focuses on effective ways to support new English teachers and student teachers.
Research for the Classroom: Playing with Difficult Poetry: High School Seniors and Arthur Sze’s Quipu
Authors: Gorlewski Julie , Fogle Andy
Published: March 2024

Research for the Classroom publishes mini-studies of ELA classroom practices and suggests ways in which high school and middle school English teachers may study the effectiveness of their pedagogy.
“Writing That Matters”: Collaborative Inquiry and Authoring Practices in a First-Grade Class
Authors: Ghiso María Paula
Published: March 2024

This article explores how a first grade class re-defines what constitutes writing achievement. The young children’s authoring practices upended notions of writing as the individual production of “model” texts with predetermined features, as was emphasized in curricular guidelines and high-stakes assessments, and of writing as disembedded from personal histories, collective inquiries, and civic concerns. Instead, being an author was anchored on collaborative and personally-relevant notions of “what matters” to students. Young children were able to use writing to investigate their classroom and neighborhood communities, in the process inquiring into the significance of human relationships and the varied purposes to which they might put their written work.
I Am from a Writing School
Authors: Johnson Julie
Published: March 2024

6
Profiles and Perspectives: J. Patrick Lewis: A Joyful Master of Poetry, Pun, and Word Play
Authors: Ward Barbara A. , Young Terrell A.
Published: March 2024

Most readers think that prolific children’s poet J. Patrick Lewis has always been a poet and an author of children’s poetry. But nothing could be further from the truth. Lewis was once an academic, teaching and writing articles about economics at a university before the allure of poetry beckoned him from his ivory tower world. This profile of the 16th recipient of the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children explores some of the influences on Lewis’s writing life as well as some of his favorite topics. Lewis also provides insight into his creative process and coins a phrase or two while sharing the start of a poem.
Don Graves Remembered
Authors: Romano Tom
Published: March 2024

In the wake of Don Graves’s death in September, 2010, Romano reflects on what made him a great teacher, mentor, and human being. Filled with references to his books, his teaching methods, and his unmistakable energy and rapport with children, the article encourages us to revisit the theory and methods that allowed Don Graves to connect with children and coax out their stories and writing.
Connected Kids? K–2 Children’s Use and Understanding of the Internet
Authors: Dodge Autumn M. , Husain Nahid , Duke Nell K.
Published: March 2024

In this article, we report on our own inquiry, and others’, into young children’s use of, understanding of, and skills related to the Internet. We found that the overwhelming majority of children at this age are already using the Internet, mostly for playing games, and already showing substantial gaps in Internet skill level. Most children we studied had little conceptual understanding of the Internet, were unaware of its potential dangers, and sometimes used the Internet without adult supervision. A parent questionnaire revealed that parents’ knowledge of their children’s overall Internet competence was sometimes inaccurate. Policies, standards, and pedagogy for and related to K–2 children’s Internet use should be informed by research.
Inquiry as a Way of Life: Kathy G. Short, 2011 Outstanding Educator in the Language Arts
Authors: García Andrea
Published: March 2024

This article honors Kathy G. Short, who has been awarded NCTE’s Outstanding Educator in the English Language Arts award for 2011. Kathy’s scholarly achievements as a lifelong inquirer, teacher, and mentor are featured in this article, celebrating her national and international influence in the field of literacy education.
Conversation Currents: Digital Footprints
Authors: Coiro Julie , Kajder Sara
Published: March 2024

Julie Coiro and Sara Kajder converse about how they use digital tools with teachers and children. We are excited to share their experience and insights about how teachers can incorporate these options in the classroom.
Story as World Making
Authors: Short Kathy G.
Published: March 2024

Stories are woven so tightly into the fabric of our everyday lives that it’s easy to overlook their significance in framing how we think about ourselves and the world. Stories are meaning making, providing a means of structuring and reflecting on our experiences in order to understand their significance. Story is also life making, a way of knowing. Educators are often so focused on using literature to teach something else that they lose sight of literature as having value in and of itself in illuminating what it means to be human. In addition, story is world making, inviting readers to participate in another’s vision of the world and to “live through,” not just gain knowledge about, life. This vision provides a way for students to imagine and live within and across global cultures. Finally, story defines our professional identities and possibilities as teachers, creating the basis for a true democracy of the intellect.
Professional Book Reviews: Contextualizing Literacy
Authors: Jewett Pamela C. , Reeves Lillian G. , Laman Tasha Tropp
Published: March 2024

An investigation into the differences and similarities between local and global literacy forces us to question what constitutes literacy. This issue’s Professional Book Review department focuses on three books that challenge conventional views of global or standardized literacy by highlighting literate practices of formerly colonized or enslaved people. These books emphasize the need to contextualize, rather than standardize, our conceptions of literacy.
A New Spin on Miscue Analysis: Using Spider Charts to Web Reading Processes
Authors: Wohlwend Karen E.
Published: March 2024

This article introduces a way of seeing miscue analysis data through a spider chart, a readily available digital graphing tool that provides an effective way to visually represent readers’ complex coordination of interrelated cueing systems. A spider chart is a standard feature in recent spreadsheet software that puts a new spin on miscue analysis by quickly generating visual displays of children’s documented reading processes. Also known as radar charts, spider charts show webs that point to the apparent strategies that readers are using, providing a way to quickly visualize how well readers are noticing and coordinating syntactic, semantic, and graphophonic cues during the process of constructing meaning for a text. Following a brief overview of miscue analysis procedures, a range of spider charts is presented, using charts generated from reading analyses conducted by preservice teachers in the author’s early literacy methods course.
Research and Policy: Developing Discussion
Authors: Maloch Beth , Bomer Randy
Published: March 2024

Researchers and educators have long argued for the importance of providing time and space for rich conversations around literature. This column draws on research to consider how teachers make room for these discussions inside their classrooms. Particularly, the authors consider different dimensions along which teachers might examine and grow discussions in their classrooms: inviting and growing literary response, growing strategies for conversation, and acquiring the discourse practices of a community.
Professional Book Reviews: Watching Children Grow as Thinkers, Learners, and Readers
Authors: Spence Lucy K. , Mills Heidi , Donnelly Amy
Published: March 2024

In this issue, we take a look at child development and at authors who conceptualize child development as a process of being and becoming learners and literate people. The first review examines what we learn when we observe one learner closely—first as a person and then as a learner across time. Julianne Wurm’s (2005) book invites readers into Reggio Emilia schools and describes the processes and practices that inform this child-centered and generative curriculum that has resulted in preeminent early childhood schooling in Italy and is generating renewal in the United States. Our final review examines the importance of unpacking our reading practices from the inside in order to teach readers in ways that help them know and grow their own understandings about their reading processes.
Multimodal, Digital Composition for Children with Autism: Lessons on Process, Product, and Assessment
Authors: Pandya Jessica Z. , Hansuvadha Nat , Pagdilao Kathleah C.
Published: March 2024

In this article, we examine the multimodal, digital autobiography of Cindy, an eight-year-old student with autism. We first describe the process we went through with Cindy to make her video in an inclusive, general education classroom setting. Then we examine the different modes through which Cindy made meaning in her video, focusing on the ways she used images, sound, titles, and video within the video. We then discuss the ways Cindy exploited certain affordances of multimodality, such as overcoming blocks to verbal communication by recording and editing voiceovers. Finally, we sketch some lessons teachers and researchers might learn from Cindy in terms of working with children with autism in general education language arts classes and in terms of working with all children from an assets-based approach.
Collaborative Translation: Negotiating Student Investment in Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
Authors: Cole Mikel W. , David Samuel S. , Jiménez Robert T.
Published: March 2024

We employ Bonny Norton’s idea of investment to explore the ways middle school emergent bilingual students negotiated their language identities during participation in a culturally responsive intervention that draws upon students’ translanguaging practices to improve their English reading comprehension. Students exerted agency by negotiating the ways they were positioned by other students, the research team, and their school. The dynamic nature of their identities highlights the instructional promises and challenges of honoring student agency. We provide a framework for implementing collaborative translation in teachers' classrooms.
“Rise Up!”: Literacies, Lived Experiences, and Identities within an In-School “Other Space”
Authors: Wissman Kelly K.
Published: March 2024

In this article, I consider the literacy practices that emerged in an in-school elective course centered in the literacy tradition of African American women. Drawing from spatial perspectives (Leander & Sheehy, 2004), I explore what it means to consider this course an “Other space” (Foucault, 1986), as a space created without the constraints of a mandated curriculum or standardized test pressures and as a space informed by an understanding of the connections among literacies, lived experiences, and identities. Through the presentation and analysis of five vignettes, I consider how the students shaped the course to their own ends and pursued agentive literacy work resonant with the epistemologies in the literacy tradition of African American women. While I situate these contributions and literacy practices within Black feminist and postpositivist realist theories of identities, I contend their full measure cannot be understood without a look at the physical aspects of the space, the travel of texts into and out of it, and its relational and affective dimensions. I conclude with considerations for pursuing literacy pedagogies attentive to social identities and for creating ”Other spaces” within a time of standardization and testing.
Featured Methodological Article: Analyzing Literacy Practice: Grounded Theory to Model
Authors: Purcell-Gates Victoria , Perry Kristen H. , Briseño Adriana
Published: March 2024

In this methodological and theoretical article, we address the need for more cross-case work on studies of literacy in use within different social and cultural contexts. The Cultural Practices of Literacy Study (CPLS) project has been working on a methodology for cross-case analyses that are principled in that the qualitative nature of each case, with its layers of context and interpretive meaning making by the researcher, is maintained while still allowing for data aggregation across cases. We present a model of a literacy practice that emerged from this work as one that may contribute to the work of other literacy researchers who are looking for theoretically driven ways to analyze and interpret ethnographic accounts of literacy practice on a larger scale and to answer questions about literacy practice across studies. We describe our theoretically based coding scheme, as well as the development of a large ethnographic database of literacy practices data and the technical aspects of lifting ethnographic data into a large database. We also provide a description of a pilot cross-case analysis as an example of the promise of such qualitative cross-case databases.
Standpoints: The Disciplined Interdisciplinarity of Writing Studies
Authors: Bazerman Charles
Published: March 2024

Charles Bazerman reminds us of the complexity of writing. He describes his own journey of disciplined study of writing as one that has necessarily been interdisciplinary, or more precisely, that has involved a series of different disciplinary engagements, each of which is aimed at illuminating some dimension of literate activity and its social consequences.
Commentary on “Research in Secondary English, 1912–2011: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities in the NCTE Imprint”
Authors: Hillocks George
Published: March 2024

Noted researcher George Hillicks comments on Jory Brass and Leslie David Burns's useful and informative review of research appearing in the English Journal and Research in the Teaching of English over the past 100 years.
Struggles for Perspective: A Commentary on “‘One Story of Many to Be Told’: Following Empirical Studies of College and Adult Writing through 100 Years of NCTE Journals”
Authors: Brandt Deborah
Published: March 2024

Deborah Brandt coments on Kevin Roozen and Karen Lunsford's insightful examination of empirical studies of college and adult writing published in NCTE journals over the last 100 years.
Examining Digital Literacy Practices on Social Network Sites
Authors: Buck Amber
Published: March 2024

Young adults represent the most avid users of social network sites, and they are also the most concerned with their online identity management, according the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Madden, 2012). These practices represent important literate activity today, as individuals who are writing online learn to negotiate interfaces, user agreements, and personal data, as well as rhetorical situations. Examining the social, technological, and structural factors that influence digital literacy practices in online environments is crucial to understanding the impact of these sites on writing practices. Applying Brooke’s (2009) concept of an “ecology of practice” to writing in digital environments, this article examines the digital literacy practices of one undergraduate student through his self-presentation strategies. In considering the roles that social network sites play in individuals’ literacy and identity practices, writing researchers and educators can better understand the literacy practices that students engage in outside of the classroom and the experiences they bring to their academic writing.
Kristina’s Ghetto Family : Tensions and Possibilities at the Intersection of Teacher and Student Literacy Agendas
Authors: Ives Denise
Published: March 2024

Despite a growing awareness among teachers of the importance of recognizing and valuing a broader range of students’ literate resources and experiences, including those that are culturally and linguistically linked, in many language arts classrooms students’ literacy practices continue to be marginalized—remaining peripheral to, if not at odds with, the central work of the classroom. This ethnographic study, featuring a sixth-grade African American girl, examined one such case of marginalization that occurred in an urban English language arts classroom during an integrated novel study unit. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, the study considers how a student-authored play showcasing cultural and linguistic resources disrupted the planned curriculum and how tensions were negotiated by the teacher, student, and researcher. In spite of the student’s efforts and the teacher’s best intentions, hegemonic centripetal forces resisted and ultimately marginalized students’ literate interests and agendas in this classroom. Recommendations from this research include planning on, and for, dialogism by deliberately structuring curricula so there is both time and space for students’ literate interests, resources, and abilities.
“Under History’s Wheel”: The Uses of Literacy
Authors: Tinberg Howard
Published: March 2024

This paper was originally delivered as the College Celebration speech at the 2010 NCTE Convention.
Teaching the Conventions of Academic Discourse
Authors: Thonney Teresa
Published: March 2024

A study of scholarly research articles from six disciplines provides insights about academic writing that composition instructors can use to prepare students to write across the curriculum.
Self-Designed Points: Turning Responsibility for Learning Over to Students
Authors: Sommers Jeff
Published: March 2024

The use of Self-Designed Points as part of a point-by-point grading system can encourage students to exercise more initiative about their own learning in a first-year composition course.
From Rigidity to Freedom: An English Department’s Journey in Rethinking How We Teach and Assess Writing
Authors: Strouthopoulos Chris , Peterson Janet L.
Published: March 2024

This essay chronicles an English department overhauling its rubric design, curriculum, and portfolio in order to emphasize a wider range of “real-world” writing.
A Personal Touch: Embedding Library Faculty into Online English 102
Authors: Kadavy Casey , Chuppa-Cornell Kim
Published: March 2024

This article describes the collaborative process of including library faculty in an online English composition course and the effect on students’ research.
“A Lifelong Aversion to Writing”: What If Writing Courses Emphasized Motivation?
Authors: Sullivan Patrick
Published: March 2024

There has been a great deal of groundbreaking research done on motivation during the last twenty-five years, and all of it points to the importance of intrinsic motivation.This research has very significant ramifications for teachers of English.