Purpose: This study aims to discuss the ethical and political possibilities offered by the presence of teaching artists (TAs) and visual artwork in racially and culturally diverse high school literacy (English Language Arts) classrooms. Design/methodology/approach: This study explores episodes from two separate ethnographic studies that were…

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to analyze how the popular comic book series DC Graphic Novel for Young Adults depicts superhero, civilian and villains of color in the titles and address how the collection engages in or avoids discussions of racism. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a critical race content analysis to analyze how…

Purpose: By engaging levels of W/writerliness, this paper aims to identify how English Language Arts teachers' personal and professional W/writerly identities impact their performance of pedagogical agency. Design/methodology/approach: In this narrative inquiry, the author draws on theories of writing identity and agency to analyze how four…

Purpose: This study aims to illustrate how one-sixth grade language arts teacher transforms the theory of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) into practice, an effort made visible through classroom discourse. Design/methodology/approach: This classroom discourse inquiry is guided by tools of reconstructive discourse analysis which encourage a…

Purpose: Researchers and teachers have noted the power of students reading text sets or multiple texts on the same topic, and numerous articles have been published with examples of and frameworks for text set construction. This study aims to traces the theoretical assumptions of these frameworks and explores their distinct implications and…

Purpose: Faced with increasing systemic constraints and pressures, secondary school English teachers often implement transactional approaches to pedagogy and curriculum aimed at improving student results on external exams, which are then used to rank schools. Despite the pressure to teach this way, teachers acknowledge the power of literature,…

Purpose: This paper encourages teachers and scholars of English Language Arts to engage deliberately with literary ambiguity. Design/methodology/approach: Through close attention to ambiguous moments in commonly taught texts, the essay argues that explicit attention to ambiguity can support four enduring goals in the field: fostering social…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways assemblaging communities work to support, hinder or disrupt literacy pedagogy in one English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Through an expanded understanding of community based on the concept of assemblage, this paper discusses the ways in which one teacher's critical literacies…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of…

Purpose: The purposes of this study is to expand on previous work in English language arts (ELA) disciplinary literacy and to unpack literary text reading processes across three different participant groups. Design/methodology/approach: The authors recruited literary scholars and first-year college students to read literary texts aloud and voice…

Purpose: Recently, practitioner literature in English education has taken up the issue of writing-related shame in classrooms, calling for teachers to help students develop resilience. One possible approach for nurturing shame resilience around writing is dialogic collaging: students make and dialogically engage with collages and with colleagues…

Purpose: This paper aims to argue that culturally responsive approaches to literacy instruction are necessary not only to celebrate Black girl literacies but to also expose, challenge and disrupt antiblackness in English education. However, without explicit exemplars to guide classroom practice, this type of instruction will remain elusive. The…

Purpose: In this paper, the authors engage with embodied critical literacies through an exploration of the possibilities provided by the use of improvisational comedy (improv) in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to extend understandings of critical literacy to consider how embodied critical literacy may be transformative for both…

Purpose: Following recent scholarship promoting the study of sports-related texts as a vehicle for examining sociopolitical issues, this study aims to identify methods and materials used to facilitate the extended exploration of sociopolitical issues in a secondary sports literature class and to establish how students describe their experiences…

Purpose: This study aims to understand the supports and challenges to using disciplinary and antiracism lenses when teaching with informational texts in middle grades English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms. Design/methodology/approach: This paper analyzes teacher talk in four virtual sessions with four middle grades ELA teachers in one school…