This study examines five novice teachers' perceptions of their preparation, interests, and abilities to integrate citizenship education into their secondary English language arts classrooms. The English teachers in this study highlight the difficulty in promoting progressive, social justice curricula without first grounding that pursuit in…

This case study of an English methods course examines how preservice teachers demonstrate knowledge, skills, and dispositions for social justice teaching. Qualitative analyses of participants' performances on two signature course assessments, micro-teaching and unit planning, show how opportunities to demonstrate socially just teaching practices…

This article investigates the experiences of three early-career secondary English urban teachers who sought to strengthen their perspectives and practices of social justice teaching through professional development. Data include teacher interviews across their first three years of teaching, artifacts across three participants representing their…

This article focuses on Mr. Kurt, a white, first-year English teacher in an all-white context who has chosen to teach his students about whiteness, white supremacy, white privilege, and the many ways institutionalized racism is enacted in daily life. I center this article on classroom scenarios that highlight the challenges embedded in dealing…

In this article, we describe the promise of professional development for teachers by considering the following questions: (1) What do teachers who work in urban public schools see as the intended purposes of professional development, and what do they identify as their needs? (2) Can a move from professional development as absent of what teachers…

Pedagogies of healing and critical media literacy are important, especially in the wake of racial violence when mainstream media work to stigmatize, characterize, and marginalize Black youth by projecting them as "dangerous Others." In this article, we offer an overview of how mainstream media reinscribe and reinforce white supremacy,…

In the wake of racial violence, teacher educators, literacy scholars, and classroom teachers are looking for ways to teach about in/equities and in/justice. In this article, I position #SayHerName as an entry point for educators and scholars to think about how English education and English language arts classrooms can become spaces to address…

In this study, we examine a multiyear professional development program designed to help English teachers incorporate "connected learning" into their classrooms. We propose a model of professional learning we term "collaborative design as mediated praxis," which refines and extends the five features of high-quality professional…

Despite the largely degrading media representations of Blackness, historically, Black girls and women have been strong activists, disrupting narratives the media conveys about Black girl- and womanhood. Centering Black girls' lived experience through critical media literacy can give them the opportunity to develop the language to identify,…

This article addresses the importance of foregrounding social justice in teaching and assessing dispositions for preservice teachers in secondary English language arts. We provide a historical overview of dispositions and their politicization, and we address NCATE's removal of social justice and its impending return. We conclude with possibilities…

Teacher educators, literacy scholars, and classroom teachers are beginning to develop curricula that leverage digital literacy practices and make visible what elementary students are learning across modalities. Although this body of work provides valuable examples (e.g., digital storytelling, innovative uses of digital apps and platforms, creating…

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…

In "Letters to a Young Teacher," Jonathan Kozol (2007) describes the need for teachers to "speak out as witnesses to the injustices they see each day in public schools" (p. 93). Sometimes beginning teachers need help learning to see injustices, as well as in making sense of the sociopolitical systems of which schooling is a part. Or, as in the…

The 19 individuals who gathered at Elmhurst College in the summer of 2009 to work on moving social justice theory into policy in English education had a singular goal--to codify a working framework for social justice in English education that could disrupt inequitable educational practices and empower all students to reach their potential…

This critical ethnographic study explores how two teacher candidates in English education used specific and varied literacy practices to enact their social justice priorities at a troubled high school in a high-need district. Data include interviews before and after the student teaching experience; observations of teaching, blogs, journals, and…