Research in the Teaching of English

This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction, the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes, interviews, and student writing, this study asks, (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking () and politicized funds of knowledge (), positioned themselves as change agents, and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.

An equitable education for linguistically minoritized and racialized-Othered youth fosters their biliteracy and critical consciousness about racial ideologies. Yet little is known about how or whether secondary-level dual-language bilingual-education programs and teachers seek to enhance students’ critical consciousness—especially as a means of grappling with racist ideologies. Drawing together literacy and race studies in education, I theorize a continuum of racial literacies, then employ it to examine dual-language curriculum and instruction practices. I use interview and classroom-observation data to reveal that a racially diverse dual-language program offered more racial-literacy practices on the hegemonic end of the continuum than the counterhegemonic end. Using teachers’ practices as an index of their program’s stance on racial literacy, I argue that the program provided a whitestream bilingual education: it offered biliteracy schooling through hegemonic racial-literacy practices that perpetuate white supremacy. The teachers’ successes and challenges speak to the need for structural attention to resources, training, and program-wide support for critical-racial-literacy practices. I conclude the article by joining calls for bilingual education to enhance youths’ critical-racial consciousness, adding racial to signal the need to be intentional in teaching about and countering racism, colonialism, and imperialism.

The policing of Black Language is inextricably tied to the policing of Black people and is entrenched in a long history of white Western European colonization. The legacies of white supremacy pervade schooling in its earliest years, yet Black teachers have consistently mounted a counterforce in battling white hegemony. In this article, I feature one such teacher, Raniya, who licensed Black Language in her preK classroom. Based on three months of classroom observations and interviews, this ethnographic case study explores the institutional architecture that affords white supremacist language assessments, particularly through an epistemology of language as an abstracted entity and through its process of curricularization. A raciolinguistic perspective illuminated how the white teachers at Raniya’s school insisted on broadly dehumanizing students of color through a schoolwide policy based on white monolingual standards. Drawing on notion of “vernacular insurrections,” I juxtapose white teachers’ raciolinguistic ideologies with Raniya’s practices. She claimed her classroom as a critical vernacular site through her approach of student language as a practice, and by subverting the normalcy of white hegemony within the schoolwide assessment process. This article calls for a shift in thinking about skills-based, decontextualized approaches as inherently white supremacist, and excavates how such a language approach supports white supremacy to thrive. I discuss the significance of centering the fight against white supremacy in our analysis of literary practices, which elucidates the potency of even small amounts of white dominance in institutional mechanisms as detrimental for Black students. As a field, the stagnation of Black student equity and commitment to white hegemony by white educators and administrators across preK through higher education persists. Though some white educators diverge from hegemonic practices, we must consider who benefits and what is sustained when exceptions are used to overlook and not interrogate the norm. This work contributes to the mounting rationales for racial diversification in the teacher workforce.

Literacy learning is an ideological proposition, one that privileges certain forms of language and those who speak them above others. This qualitative study utilizes critical metaphor analysis () to examine the literacy ideologies at work in a secondary remedial reading class. By analyzing the speech of Mr. Baker, a seasoned remedial reading teacher, and his ninth-grade student Angelica, three dominant metaphors in the corpus are explored: READING CLASS IS A RACE, LEARNING TO READ is a journey, and STUDENTS ARE MACHINES. Findings suggest both the limitations of the metaphors employed by participants as well as the utility of critical metaphor analysis in uncovering the ideological underpinnings of school-based literacy practices.

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We describe the work of two groups of middle school youth as they authored stories set in their community, based on superhero and absurdist storytelling genres. Their storytelling was part of a weekly ELA project that took place from February through May 2017 in a public middle school in a neighborhood where economic inequality defines many facets of everyday life. Drawing on audio and video recordings from ten weekly storytelling events, field notes, interviews, and close readings of youth narratives, we describe how youth created and initiated proleptic bids and, thereby, opened proleptic gaps for improvising on and producing new material with the potential to rescript the meanings of childhood and equity in their communities. We argue that these bids and gaps made space for youth to not only critique but also move beyond dominant readings of their neighborhood, and we suggest that such openings are therefore necessary for transformative literacy pedagogy and practice. We further argue that proleptic pedagogy, in the form of joint storytelling, affords a compelling and sustainable space for youth to experience joy, friendship, and artist-authoring identities, all of which have been systematically eroded by federal, state, and district policies oriented to testing and closed meanings.

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This research offers a critical content analysis of three middle grade novels that is substantiated by key concepts within Afro-pessimism, Black critical theory, and Black futurity. Through this framing, we examine significant historic and sociopolitical moments reflected in the novels when Black preteen protagonists are forced to confront racialized violence. Across the set of novels, we outline a distinct pattern of antiblackness—one that chronicles the incomplete nature of emancipation that continuously haunts Black lives in the United States (). Yet, at the same time, we consider how the novels connect the past, present, and future by reflecting how Black girls across time and location have imagined alternative ways forward.

This study explores the potential of fifth-grade children to take up, mold, and complicate the superhero genre to engage issues of social justice and equity in critical and dynamic ways. Using critical discourse and visual analysis, I explore the ideological and political work in the comics four students of color created as part of this study. I argue that, when given the opportunity to embody their full selves in the creation process to fight against issues of injustice that matter to them, children are more likely to imagine beyond conceptions of the child (e.g., being apolitical) and take on activist stances. Moreover, teachers have the power to encourage children to see themselves and their voices as important tools in the fight for social justice. This study pushes us to consider that we, as adults, can either help to expand the possibilities available to children or continue to perpetuate the inequities that children experience on a daily basis due to misconceptions of what it means to be a child and what children are capable of.

Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies, affect theory, and critical literacy, this article explores comics made by three eighth-grade students in response to Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus. Students’ comics were developed through participatory research alongside their classroom teacher, a research team, and teacher candidates from a local university. These three students, Stella, Maisie, and Naomi, reacted strongly to the content of Maus and the comics medium, and raised questions around identity, representation, and the legibility of their often-intense emotional responses. We trace their affective engagements to explore how comic-making allowed students to represent feelings that are often difficult to make visible in school spaces. Our analysis highlights how affective critical literacy orients teaching and research toward working-through rather than resolving complicated emotions, allowing educators to recognize unanswered questions as forms of critical engagement.

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Drawing on data from a yearlong qualitative study examining how children in a multi-age (6-9 years) classroom utilized technology to write across genres, this article examines the gendered negotiation and discursive uptake of expert in early childhood writing. Zeroing in on genius hour as a “site of engagement,” the author thinks with rhetorical genre studies and mediated discourse analysis to examine how four second-grade writers positioned themselves as “experts” across the nexus of school writing. Findings highlight how expert—both conceptually and in practice—became gendered and was interdiscursively traced through three threads: the relational, the historical, and the distributive. Through analyses of young students writing in situ, this article contributes new understandings to thinking about children’s navigation of genres, not only as rhetorical typifications of academic and disciplinary discourse but as unique social actions of curricular play and gendered uptake.

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Anti-immigrant legal violence and grassroots organizing against it have fundamentally shaped the lives of immigrant children and families in the US. This article inquires into the intergenerational literacy, teaching, and learning practices of Latinx immigrants’ political mobilization, drawing on qualitative data from a larger yearlong practitioner inquiry study that involved observant participant field notes, artifacts, photographs, and in-depth interviews with 11 undocumented and documented Latinx immigrants with whom I, a Latina immigrant, shared an organizing practice. Through analysis grounded on literacy as critical sociocultural practice, intergenerational learning, and Chicana/Latina education in everyday life, I argue that Latinx immigrants mobilize against oppression through critical literacy practices that facilitate what I theorize as a “communal pedagogy of resistance.” This is an intergenerational pedagogy enacted in communal spaces that grows from Latinx immigrants’facultad,meaning the critical consciousness and epistemic privilege that results from living in the liminal space of theborderlands. This pedagogy views our community’s cultural, literacy, and linguistic practices as strengths and tools of resilience and resistance, and expands our definition of family and our sense of interdependence to fellow oppressed communities, teaching us to enact inclusive justice. A key takeaway is that Latinx immigrant students’ educational and literacy practices cannot be separated from those of their wider family/community, nor from their intergenerational sociopolitical struggles and expertise. Another is that intergenerational literacy and learning are bi/multidirectional. Implications include the need for educational institutions to learn from this pedagogy, and for additional literacy research into communal sociopolitical mobilization.

Since 2003, RTE has published the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English,” a list of curated and annotated works reviewed and selected by a large group of dedicated educator-scholars in our field. The goal of the annual bibliography is to offer a synthesis of the research published in the area of English language arts within the past year for RTE readers’ consideration. Abstracted citations and those featured in the “Other Related Research” sections were published, either in print or online, between June 2020 and June 2021. The bibliography is divided into nine sections, with some changes to the categories this year in response to the ever-evolving nature of research in the field. Small teams of scholars with diverse research interests and background experiences in preK–16 educational settings reviewed and selected the manuscripts for each section using library databases and leading scholarly journals. Each team abstracted significant contributions to the body of peer-reviewed studies that addressed the current research questions and concerns in their topic area.

This paper examines the multiliteracies practices () of 20 high school students who participated in a weeklong summer research institute at the start of a 6-month-long community-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) initiative. Data analyzed included 20 digital multimodal compositions produced by youths, individual interviews with youths, and observations of youths’ participation in the YPAR initiative. Data analysis utilized theories of multiliteracies practices () and culturally sustaining pedagogies () enacted across contexts of YPAR (). Findings contribute new insights about students’ multiliteracies practices in YPAR in two ways. First, we examine how learning about research methods shifted students’ understandings of research and the role their experiences could play in YPAR. Second, we examine how students’ digital literacies practices () supported them in generating new narratives about their community in digital multimodal compositions. Finally, we consider how insights gained from our examination may support educators in developing and enacting culturally sustaining () learning contexts that build with students’ multiliteracies practices as strengths while challenging persistent educational inequities.

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Our multiphase research conducted with a broader research team explores narratives of bullying across young adult literature, the news media, public discourse, and adolescents’ experiences, and problematizes oversimplified understandings of the adolescent bullying process.

Informed by Bakhtin's theorization of voice as well as cross-disciplinary studies of scaling, the authors explore how a group of young filmmakers rendered one focal immigrant student's familial history by centering speakers addressing the topic of immigration from multiple levels, thereby connecting multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in their multimodal storytelling to illustrate the costs of dehumanizing policies. In this case study, drawing from classroom observations, student work, and interviews with both students and teachers, the authors also highlight the importance of teacher agency in creating opportunities for refugee-background students to interactively engage in the language arts classroom. Drawing from interviews, observations, and analysis of student writing, the authors construct a detailed case study of how one student writer negotiated her stance toward the discourse of literary analysis based on her own writerly identity as a creative writer, illuminating the importance of critically attending to the ideological implications of teaching discipline-specific writing.

The discourse of literary analysis is dynamic and ideological, shifting as writers navigate conventions and practices to meet their rhetorical purposes in particular contexts. While scholars have engaged ideological analyses of students learning to write literary analysis essays in university contexts, few studies have documented student writers’ experiences of disciplinary enculturation in secondary English language arts classrooms. In this case study, we address this absence by using the concept of stance to examine how the identity of one student—Katarina—informed her interactions with the discourse of literary analysis as it was understood and instantiated by her teacher. In our analysis of essay drafts, field notes, artifacts, and interview transcripts, we found that the convergence of Katarina’s identity as a creative and emotional person and writer with the possibilities for selfhood afforded to her in this context contributed to her stance toward the discourse. We examine points of tension across two of Katarina’s essays that illuminate her ideological struggles as she navigated the discourse of her classroom. Our findings point to the utility of stance as a conceptual tool for researchers and educators to take a critical perspective on students’ writing processes in the context of the ideologically laden, authoritative demands of secondary classrooms.

This study builds on research of multimodal storytelling in educational settings by presenting a study of a youth-produced documentary on immigration. Drawing from a video documentary project in a high school class, we examine students’ representational processes of scaling in documentary storytelling, and the kinds of resources they use to construct multiple spatiotemporal contexts for understanding their experience of immigration and immigration policy. Our theoretical framework relates the concept of scale to the Bakhtinian concept of voice to consider the semiotic resources that are used to index and connect multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in storytelling. Focusing on a documentary produced by some students in the class, we analyze how the young filmmakers used particular speaker voices (characters) and their social positioning to invoke and construct relevant scales for understanding the problem of deportation. Our analysis extends the study of scaling to multimodal texts, and the strategies that people use to represent and configure relationships among different socially stratified spaces. By conceptualizing the relations between voice and scale, this work aims to contribute to literacy learning and teaching that support young people in bringing their knowledge, experiences, and narrative resources to engage with societal structures.

Student agency is an important construct for all students, especially those marginalized because of their linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, or migratory identities. Refugee-background students may experience marginalization according to many and sometimes all of these factors; agency is thus critical to understanding their negotiation of schooling in general and literacy tasks in particular. While many studies have explored various dimensions of agency, we know little about how agency can be enacted and developed by minoritized students within instructional contexts. This qualitative case study addresses this gap by asking: How do two adolescent refugee-background students display evidence of agency when engaging in literacy tasks? What teacher practices contribute to facilitating or inhibiting student agency? Data sources include classroom observations, student work samples, and interviews with students and teachers. Data analysis was conducted using a combined inductive/deductive approach. Findings reveal three agentive practices through which students engaged in literacy tasks: agentive resistance leading to disaffection, agentive resistance of imposed identities, and interactive negotiated engagement. While the first practice led to disengagement, the latter two led to opportunities for students to agentively reshape dehumanizing narratives of multilingual refugee-background students. Teacher agency in curriculum planning and implementation was essential in guiding students to either engage in or resist literacy tasks. Since the forced displacement that refugee-background and some immigrant students experience is contrary to the concept of self-determination, we argue that engaging them in an agentive manner has the potential to help students reclaim that sense of agency within classrooms and challenge deficit perceptions.

Martinez et al talk about solidarity within and across their respective racial and ethnic communities and how solidarity must be centralized in literacy research, practices, and scholarship. They provide a layered understanding of what solidarity can mean when working with children, youth, teachers, teacher educators, and our own families. By sharing their own varied experiences, they seek to highlight everyday moments of ingenuity in learning spaces that can be leveraged to bolster solidarity within and across BIPOC communities.