Recent decades show increased scholarship in literacy education considering LGBTQ-themed texts and LGBTQ people in English language arts classrooms. Building on studies exploring choice in school-based reading, I focus on the experiences of youth navigating their visibility when they interacted with other people about their queer reading choices…

This article details a self-study dissecting an interracial group of students' theories of Blackness in a postsecondary classroom. I begin by conceptualizing "fugitive literacy practices" as tools with which to awaken and animate education as the practice of liberation from whiteness and anti-Blackness. I then approach multimodal essay…

This article explores how the computer-mediated communication (CMC) tool of blogging served as a teaching and learning tool about diversity and inequity in English education. It analyzes the blog writings of two preservice teachers who used their blogs as a space to encourage themselves and their peers to consider racial, linguistic, and other…

In light of the current assaults on Black girls and misaligned instructional practices in and outside of schools across the nation, English educators need to understand a more complete vision of the identities girls create for themselves, and the literacies and practices needed to best teach them. This article provides a review of literature of…

It is sometimes assumed that "digital natives" will more easily integrate new literacies into their classrooms once they begin their careers. This study followed preservice teachers at the junior level who were taking part in a year-long field experience set in an urban high school. This field experience was set in the context of an…

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…

English teachers and educators of English teachers should work within rather than against the tensions present in their classrooms. For us, nothing could be more key. Until university teacher educators construct and enact classrooms that embrace the dialogical tensions and possibilities within those settings, new and veteran teachers in the…

This 5-month qualitative study investigates how one high school English teacher situated students as readers and writers within daily, spontaneous classroom interactions. Specifically, the author draws on positioning theory (van Langenhove & Harre, 1999) as a lens to analyze how the teacher navigated improvised responses during three separate…

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…

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…

Explores--through a close analysis of one innovative class project--the questions of text, power, and technology implied in a shift to a broader definition of text in the English classroom. Poses the intersection of technology and media literacy as a crucial site for new understandings of the texts at stake in twenty-first century literacies and…

Explores the role that tagging (a simple form of graffiti) plays around the school and community. Argues that even the writing of a name on a wall opens out into a rich discourse community, in which taggers carry on complex conversations, negotiate and challenge shared discursive norms, and develop identities that are intimately connected to a…

Offers several reasons why English teachers should set aside the notion of literature and center teaching around the related but distinct notion of textuality. Discusses why the study of textuality should play a major role in a full curriculum aimed toward the development of alert, aware citizens. (JD)

Discusses a recent national survey of English language arts educators regarding middle school English. Learns that many respondents to the survey lacked knowledge about middle schools as sites for literacy learning. Notes that few English educators felt they had the necessary resources available to them for developing courses and field experiences…

In this article, the authors reflect upon their professional "journey through oracy" by offering a review of literature on "talk"--an exploration of the various ways in which "talk" has been explored by theorists and researchers in the last century. By interweaving into this review a collection of reflections on their own published work, the…