Current English Language Arts programming and pedagogy, having evolved from colonial and racist histories, continue to employ instructional practices set to exclude, deculturalize, and assimilate America's marginalized citizens. Today's literacy educators continue to play a crucial role, regardless of intention, by further marginalizing their…

Culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) has emerged as an essential way to value the evolution of culture among diverse learners. Discussions around teaching in a culturally sustaining manner in the English language arts classroom, specifically when teaching literary analysis, often address the need to incorporate multicultural literature so…

This chapter will provide an analysis of current educational conditions of Black males within our K-12 school system and the ongoing instructional implications for school leaders working to address literacy leadership and practice. It will provide insight and motivation for school leaders as they navigate political, social, and policy systems that…

This practical book provides teachers with step-by-step guidance for developing a class culture that welcomes curiosity and ignites social action. Student-driven inquiry has a lasting impact on learning, yet questions posed from students' own contexts rarely serve to shape their understanding of the outside world. The authors show teachers how to…

In this article, we examine one teacher's enactment of critical literacy pedagogy in a 7th-grade English language arts classroom in a New York City public school. By conceptualizing critical global literacies in relation to preservice and in-service teaching practices that reflect neoliberal interests, we attend to pedagogy inclusive of…

Disrupting the canon of Eurocentric literature often used as a whole-class novel study in the secondary English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum is needed in order to push back against white hegemony in and out of ELA spaces. This disruption needs to occur at the teacher preparation level through discussion, examination, and curriculum development,…

This paper explores how two teacher candidates in an equity-focused preparation program negotiated among multiple perspectives about teaching the English Language Arts in linguistically and culturally diverse teaching contexts. We present cases of two preservice teachers (PTs) who experienced tensions in their development as a result of…

This case study explores how a research-practice partnership worked to cross-pollinate culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) over the course of a 9-week spoken word poetry unit in a seventh-grade classroom. The unit reflected CSP's commitment to linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism (e.g., centering…

This paper examines how, as a teacher researcher, I employed a narrative approach to research to better understand my 8th grade Language Arts students' empowerment in school. Drawing on sociocultural theory, critical pedagogy and a narrative approach to teacher research, students' voices were privileged and compared to the systemic assumptions…

Research suggests that while students in public schools in the U.S. are becoming increasingly diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and culture, the pool of prospective teachers is made up largely of White, middle-class women. The demographic imperative indicates that this trend will remain stable for the foreseeable future, reinforcing the…

As the new English Language Arts Common Core State Standards take hold across the United States, the need grows for pre-service and in-service teachers to be ready to develop curriculum and instruction that addresses their requirements. This timely, thoughtful, and comprehensive text directly meets this need. It delineates a literacy practices and…