Research in the Teaching of English

There is a particular urgency in this political moment to understand children’s experiences with current events. Drawing from data generated following the 2016 presidential election, this paper focuses on three racially and linguistically diverse children’s persuasive compositions. Within a critical literacies writing unit focused on (im)migrant experiences, children called on legislators to act on the Republican administration’s policies. Building on the understanding that all literacies are political and that teaching and learning are value-laden tasks, the author engaged a cultural rhetorics orientation—grounded in the understanding of texts, bodies, materials, and ideas as interconnected aspects of communication—for data generation and analysis. The findings highlight how children strategically employed rhetoric to persuade. They used logos, pathos, and ethos, as well as story, a central tool for meaning-making and building practices in the world. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how children, when properly supported, can agentively participate in critical literacies and act on real-world politics. Through the stories of young children, this study emphasizes what children have to tell adults and what a cultural rhetorics orientation, through its emphasis on story, enables literacies researchers and educators to understand about children’s composing.

Since 2003, RTE has published the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English,” and we are proud to share these curated and annotated citations once again. 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 that may be of interest to RTE readers. Abstracted citations and those featured in the “Other Related Research” sections were published, either in print or online, between June 2019 and June 2020. The bibliography is divided into nine subject area sections. A three-person team 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 empirical 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 article will explore what I have conceptualized as critical celebration within an afterschool writing club for and with Girls of Color (GOC). Using a feminist of color theoretical framework and building upon existing literature about GOC and their writing practices, critical celebration will be defined as a lens used to view GOC as important, dynamic, and brilliant in the face of an overabundance of deficitizing narratives and erasure, and to also open opportunities for girls to view the experiences and identities of GOC like them and unlike them as important sources of knowledge as they develop critical insights toward solidarity across difference. Using this definition, I will then describe the ways the feminist of color writing pedagogy engaged in this group made space for critical celebration of and by GOC, thereby offering important implications for justice-oriented literacy education, not only for GOC, but for all students.

The prevalence of high-stakes testing, scripted curricula, and accountability measures in schools discourages experimentation with curriculum. This article encourages curriculum design experimentation in teacher education by proposing playful practices, game-like activities for designing curriculum that draws on students’ out-of-school literacies. We explore the benefits and challenges of game-based curriculum design with preservice teachers (PSTs; N = 19) in two public university secondary English education courses and trace one PST’s take-up of the curriculum design moves through incorporation of these playful practices into her classroom. Data collection occurred across one academic year and included field and observation notes, written reflections, interview data, and artifacts. Findings show the potential for game-based curriculum design in literacy teacher education to (1) create an imaginative space between teacher and student, (2) encourage collaborative production, (3) connect PST university coursework to classroom practice, (4) support students’ creative language production, and (5) create playful social contexts for participatory learning. Challenges highlight the importance of attending to power dynamics in game play and design. Implications include how game-based pedagogical invitations in teacher education can help PSTs imagine new ways to organize classroom structures and literacy learning experiences that value an interplay of youth cultures and classroom curriculum.

Writing studies scholars have long examined how race- and class-based hierarchies shape teachers’ and students’ experiences of writing in US universities. But universities are also workplaces that profit from a racialized writing economy in which laborers of color () underpin writing production. Drawing from a yearlong qualitative case study that examines the writing practices of university custodial workers, this article addresses the following research questions: What kinds of writing do university custodial workers use and practice? What are the conditions for their writing? And what do these practices and conditions tell us about writing in race- and class-stratified workplaces, including educational institutions? Using critical race (; ; ; ; ; ; ) approaches to literacy sponsorship (), and observations and interviews with university custodians, this article discusses two main findings: (1) labor conditions restrict participants’ writing as a part of race and class hierarchies; and (2) the participants employ writing practices that run under the radar of institutional restrictions to serve their own purposes. This study’s findings have implications for workplace writing scholarship and higher education policy, because they expand definitions of and purposes for workplace writing in institutions of education.

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Preview this article: Announcing the 2019–2020 Alan C. Purves Award Recipients: Inspiring Transformative Literacy Pedagogies: The 2020 Alan C. Purves Award Committee, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/55/3/researchintheteachingofenglish31189-1.gif

<p>Video making and sharing have the potential to represent attitude in powerful ways and have become everyday literacy practices for many children. Research has only recently attended to the multimodal grammars of attitudinal meaning that characterize filmic media, while providing few examples of the successful teaching of these semiotic principles to elementary students. This article reports original research conducted in two schools over two years with elementary students (ages 9 to 11 years). It examines students' application of semiotic knowledge of the appraisal framework to communicate attitudinal meanings multimodally through film. Attitudinal meanings in the appraisal framework are categorized as affect, judgment, or appreciation, and can be communicated through discourse and multimodal texts. The students learned to configure multiple modes, including speech, written text, image, gaze, facial expressions, body movement, posture, gesture, and sound, to communicate attitude in their films. The findings provide an exemplar for the teaching and analysis of students' filmmaking that applies systematic, multimodal grammars for communicating attitude. The findings are significant because interpersonal language is a major semiotic system of English, and visual texts now feature prominently in digital communication environments. </p>

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Preview this article: Preservice Teachers Engaging Elementary Students in an Activist Literacy Curriculum, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/55/1/researchintheteachingofenglish30899-1.gif

Preview this article: In Dialogue: Policy, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/55/1/researchintheteachingofenglish30902-1.gif

Preview this article: Compartmentalizing Faith: How Three First-Semester Undergraduates Manage Evangelical Identities in Academic Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/4/researchintheteachingofenglish30738-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: Decentering and Decentralizing Literacy Studies: An Urgent Call for Our Field, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/4/researchintheteachingofenglish30735-1.gif

Preview this article: "I Want to Be Pè Adedayo": Young Children Enacting Resistance in/ through Translingual Writing about Their Names, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/4/researchintheteachingofenglish30737-1.gif

Preview this article: Revealing the Human and the Writer: The Promise of a Humanizing Writing Pedagogy for Black Students, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/4/researchintheteachingofenglish30740-1.gif

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Preview this article: Announcing the 2018-2019 Alan C. Purves Award Recipient: Demanding Critical Literacy Pedagogies of Consequence, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/3/researchintheteachingofenglish30523-1.gif

Preview this article: Becoming Multilingual Writers through Translation, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/3/researchintheteachingofenglish30519-1.gif

Preview this article: "We Have a Strong Way of Thinking … and It Shows through Our Words": Exploring Mujerista Literacies with Chicana/Latina Youth in a Community Ethnic Studies Course, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/3/researchintheteachingofenglish30520-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Literacy, Migration, and Dislocation, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/3/researchintheteachingofenglish30518-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: Critical Digital and Media Literacies in Challenging Times: Reimagining the Role of English Language Arts, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/2/researchintheteachingofenglish30639-1.gif

Preview this article: Revision from Multiple Feedback Sources: The Attitudes and Behaviors of Three Multilingual Student Writers, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/2/researchintheteachingofenglish30624-1.gif

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Preview this article: Teaching with Digital Peer Response: Four Cases of Technology Appropriation, Resistance, and Transformation, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/2/researchintheteachingofenglish30618-1.gif

Preview this article: A Century of Change in High School English Assessments: An Analysis of 110 New York State Regents Exams, 1900–2018, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/1/researchintheteachingofenglish30240-1.gif

Preview this article: Queer Ruptures of Normative Literacy Practices: Toward Visualizing, Hypothesizing, and Empathizing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/1/researchintheteachingofenglish30241-1.gif

Preview this article: Metalepsis in Elementary Students' Multimodal Narrative Representations, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/1/researchintheteachingofenglish30239-1.gif