The purpose of this study was to understand the experiences of three middle school English language arts teachers whose social justice orientation shaped the ways they acted as teacher leaders. The decision to focus on English teachers as school leaders was a response to the narrowing of literacy education in the age of standardization (Brass, 2014) and the call for English education to be reimagined as "democratic armor" (Gatti, Masterson, Brooke, Shah, & Thomas, 2018) after the 2016 United States presidential election. Situated in teacher leadership, social justice leadership, and social justice English education scholarship, this study sought to understand how three English teachers came to embody a social justice teacher leadership stance, how they continued to develop that stance, and how they enacted social justice teacher leadership within and outside of their school. Drawing on multiple interviews, observations, and collection of artifacts, individual cases of each teacher's experiences are first established before moving into a cross-case analysis. The findings outline how the teachers had to resist and rewrite dominant narratives about leadership, hierarchies, and positions of power to understand their own positionalities and potential for being agents of change. Additionally, the findings detail how the three English teachers sought external forms of professional development and built networks of English teachers to learn from. Finally, the findings highlight how teachers who are committed to radical changes within schools work pragmatically within the confines of school structures to inch schools closer to a just reality. Collectively, the findings present a conceptualization of teacher leadership that roots traditional acts of teacher leadership in a socially just orientation. The findings have implications for scholarship focused on English education, teacher education programs, teacher leadership, and school governance and culture. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]