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Research on urban teacher education (UTE) programs have studied teacher candidates' (TCs) perceptions of urban communities and schooling, but have provided limited insights on how ideologies about dis/ability are entangled with race and other markers of difference, shaping TCs' learning about urban education. In this paper, we present an analysis drawn from a 2-year qualitative study that answers the following questions: What social categories of difference are present in a UTE program's curriculum? What ideologies related to dis/ability are utilized by TCs to describe urban education? We found that despite the UTE's program's strong emphasis on race and social justice, TCs not only drew from asset-based approaches but also from three interrelated ideologies of disablement to discuss students' behaviors: individualism, medical, and personal tragedy. We provide recommendations for UTE programs and research-based on an intersectional approach to teacher education that foregrounds dis/ability.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine playful practices in the science video composition of a fourth-grader. Design/methodology/approach: With an analytic interest in "chasing the theory of muchness" (Thiel, 2015a) that describes distinctive moments of affective energies in playful learning, the authors explored a child's video in which a food chain is dramatized. Findings: The authors identified how muchness manifested in/through her compositional play. Originality/value: The potential of playful composing and dramatizing to support meaning-making across contexts and disciplines is discussed.

Grounded in our commitment to support preservice teachers (PSTs) in an urban elementary teacher education program to develop anti-bias pedagogies, we engaged in a design-based study aimed at enacting critical conversations about texts that foster dialogue about power and privilege. In this analysis, we explore how PSTs engaged with children during discretionary moments within critical conversations in their field placements. We asked: "What generative orientations are visible in PSTs' analysis of and reflection on their facilitation of critical conversations with children?" Findings reveal that PSTs who extended dialogue during these moments in critical conversations--rather than avoiding or ignoring children's contributions--displayed an orientation toward seeing children as sensemakers; flexibly responded to encourage dialogue; and recognized the value of feeling uncomfortable.

There was a dramatic rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have 'long struggled for belonging, safety, and equity [...]

School science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non-western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the mind. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind-body divide, we aimed at creating pedagogical spaces and places in science classes that sustain equitable opportunities for engagement and meaning making where body and mind are enmeshed. In the context of a partnership between school- and university-based educators and researchers, we explored how multimodal literacies cultivated through the performing arts, provide students from minoritized communities opportunities to both create knowledge and to position themselves as science experts and brilliant and creative meaning makers. Four theoretical perspectives (social semiotics and multimodality; dramatizing and the embodied mind; dismantling master narratives for minoritized peoples; and the relationship of knowledge production and identity construction) framed this multiple case study of classes of elementary and middle school students who made sense of and communicated science concepts and practices through embodied performances. The study provided evidence that embodied science representations afford students abundant opportunities to construct science knowledge and positionings that support engagement with science, whether performed on a small scale in classrooms, or for the whole school through a large-scale science play. Embodied dramatizing led to opportunities for collective meaning making as student-performers coordinated across various movements and modes in order to represent ideas. Multiple enactments of the same concept nurtured the development of multi-dimensional scientific, sociocultural, and sociopolitical meanings. During embodiments, students positioned themselves and others in ways that allowed expanded science identities to become possible, intertwined with other salient identities. By treating children's bodies as sites of knowledge, imagination, and expertise, integrating performing arts and science has the potential to facilitate the development of connections among ideas and between self and ideas.

There have been numerous recent calls in literacy research and teacher education to disrupt the 'struggling reader' label, but a dearth of empirical studies on the topic. This qualitative analysis explores the complex issues preservice teachers (PSTs) faced as they examined young readers' sense-making through a reading assessment assignment. Our research question asked: How do PSTs challenge and/or reinforce the 'struggling reader' label as they examine young readers' sense-making? Using a conceptual lens that cross-pollinates dynamic models of reading comprehension with Disability Studies in Education, we look across three cases to identify ways PSTs challenged and reinforced the 'struggling reader' label as they examined intermediate-grade readers' interactions with texts. Ultimately, we argue that embracing a dynamic model of comprehension--on its own--is an insufficient focus in literacy teacher education in order to disrupt harmful labeling practices in schools.

Discussions about texts can offer valuable opportunities for critical conversations about power and privilege. While we know such conversations are important to have in school, many teachers report feeling unprepared to facilitate them. In an effort to understand the in-the-moment decisions preservice teachers (PSTs) make in response to children's contributions during critical conversations about texts, this qualitative, design-based study examines how PSTs responded to elementary-age children while facilitating discussions about texts in their field placements. Although various kinds of responses were made (e.g., eliciting children's thinking, orienting children's contributions to one another), in this analysis, we examine the moments where PSTs identified their silence as salient. Findings reveal that (1) some PSTs developing understanding of the role of talk and desire to efficiently accomplish the task did not seem to set them up to see critical conversations about texts as a space for sensemaking, and (2) other PSTs did see critical conversations about texts as spaces to engage in sensemaking but felt discomfort grappling with unanticipated issues that arose. We discuss implications for literacy researchers and teacher educators committed to supporting critical conversations with children in schools.

Cooperating teachers are vital in the professional development of teacher candidates. Yet, little research has been done to explore the generative and bidirectional nature of mentoring in the context of a student teaching-mentoring dyad--including the ways that teacher candidates are vital to the professional development of cooperating teachers. This case study addresses this gap by exploring the realized potential of adopting a transformative activist stance in relation to the mentoring of a preservice teacher candidate. The strategic partnering of a veteran teacher (Rick) and undergraduate teacher candidate (Daniel)--both committed to culturally sustaining pedagogies--created an opportunity to reimagine the student teaching experience in one English language arts classroom. Through collaborative reflection and artifact analysis, we examine our roles in contributing to bidirectional mentorship that stressed innovative collaboration rather than adaptation to existing power differentials.

We think of our biannual Visions and Viewpoints issues as an 'unthemed' space that invites a broad range of ideas from across the spectrum of elementary literacy. While the articles [...]

In this issue, we were interested in considering how to cultivate more inclusive elementary classrooms. Questions we asked in the call for proposal included: How is dis/ability constructed in elementary [...]

'I am because I am connected.' These are the words leading the call for proposals for the 2023 NCTE Annual Convention, with the theme Conexiones: Communicate, Collaborate, Create. It goes [...]

There is growing interest in foregrounding bodies in literacy research and pedagogy. Drawing across multiple conceptualizations of bodies as tools, mediums, and social texts, this qualitative case study examines the multifaceted nature of embodiment in two adolescent girls' school writing. Situated in a research-practice partnership that included researchers, the teacher, adolescent youth, and their parents, this analysis explores the ways writing acted with/on bodies throughout a poetry-writing unit in an urban middle school English language arts classroom. Data collected over 11 weeks included student and teacher interviews, observations and field notes, and artifacts. Through inductive coding processes, coupled with member-check interviews with participants and their parents, four themes were identified: (a) embodied knowing as inspiration for writing, (b) bodies as a mode of multimodal representation, (c) writing as a way to counternarrate against/with other bodies, and (d) bodies responding to writing.

Teachers' language ideologies inform our assumptions about what counts as valued practices in schools. As teacher educators in an urban elementary education program, we aim to sustain youths' linguistic and cultural diversity, in part by cultivating a "critical" language ideology with teachers that explicitly acknowledges the relationship between language, power, and race. Drawing from a series of semi-structured interviews with three pre-service teachers over two years, we examined their developing critical language ideologies. Although all three pre-service teachers were making moves towards a critical language ideology, they also navigated multiple tensions, with: (1) the push-pull of a standard language ideology; (2) consistently positioning languages as resources; and (3) expanding positionings of multilingual students' reading abilities. In a process of reflexive self-study, we engaged with these tensions in order to critically reflect on and adapt our own curriculum and instruction. We conclude with suggestions for future research and invite dialogue among teacher educators, pre-service teachers, and practicing teachers about pedagogical challenges and promising approaches to fostering a critical language ideology.

This qualitative case study documents a secondary English teacher's making, writing and teaching. The focal teacher engaged in diverse making practices -- including composing, crafting and digital fabrication. She also participated in a National Writing Project (NWP) Summer Institute that focused on both teacher writing and digital composing. Data include observations at this NWP Project Summer Institute and in the focal teacher's English classroom, as well as interviews and artefact collection related to her making practices. The findings describe how this teacher's making mattered for her understandings of writing and for her teaching (or not). The case offers insights into why it may be important to cultivate educator making, as well as potential tensions between experiencing making and incorporating it into writing pedagogy. Ultimately, it contributes to writing research interested in examining how various forms of production and making are enmeshed.

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 culture- and identity-focused writing) while also intentionally embedding principles of UDL (e.g., multiple means of representation, action, expression, and engagement). The analysis examines how and why some students in this classroom centered dis/ability in their poetry writing and how the design and implementation of the unit invited more complex understandings of cultures and identities. Findings suggest that CSP supported students in making their identities more visible in the classroom, while the integration of UDL principles eliminated barriers for participation. Both were integral in focal students' engagements with aspects of their identities throughout the unit. Ultimately, the unit's design facilitated the movement of the focal students from the periphery to more centripetal roles within the classroom community.

We are proud to introduce the centennial volume of Language Arts journal with a brief reflection on the journal's first one hundred volumes. Language Arts originally appeared in 1924, under [...]

We are humbled and excited that this issue will close out our first volume as editors. We have learned a lot and sought to grow our editorial team's practices and [...]

In our editorial team's inaugural issue in September 2021, we focused on the theme of antiracist pedagogies in elementary classrooms, setting an intention to return to it midway and at [...]

This issue bookends the centennial volume of Language Arts journal. In this notable volume's introductory issue in September 2022, we reflected on the journal's contributions. Over the last hundred years, [...]

Twice a year, we invite submissions that offer a variety of viewpoints and visions about topics, concerns, and issues that you think are important to today's readers of Language Arts. [...]

In schools, children do not tend to be positioned as fully human. Strong neoliberal currents perpetuate objectification, a focus on technical mastery, and mechanisms for sorting and categorizing. As part of our ongoing design-based research to revise a sequence of elementary literacy methods courses, we have collaborated university faculty and graduate student instructors. First, we describe 3 humanizing principles that have guided our work with preservice teachers: (1) supporting asset perspectives in the ways teachers view and talk about children; (2) creating literacy learning environments that support critical conversations; and (3) utilizing texts to mediate conversations about social justice. Then, we reflect on tensions we have encountered when enacting these principles within a text-based discussion module.

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how a collaborative narrative inquiry focused on cultivating critical English Language Arts (ELA) pedagogies supported teacher agency, or "the capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations" (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998, p. 971). Design/methodology/approach: Situated in a semester-long inquiry group, eight k-16 educators used narrative inquiry processes (Clandinin, 1992) to write and collectively analyze (Ezzy, 2002) stories describing personal experiences that brought them to critical ELA pedagogies. They engaged in three levels of analysis across the eight narratives, including open coding, thematic identification, and identification of how the narrative inquiry impacted their classroom practices. Findings: Across the narratives, the authors identify what aspects of the ELA reading, writing and languaging curriculum emerged as problematic; situate themselves in systems of oppression and privilege; and examine how processes of critical narrative inquiry contributed to their capacities to respond to these issues. Research limitations/implications: Collaborative narrative inquiry between teachers and teacher educators (Sjostrom and McCoyne, 2017) can be a powerful method to cultivate critical pedagogies. Practical implications: Teachers across grade levels, schools, disciplines and backgrounds can collectively organize to cultivate critical ELA pedagogies. Originality/value: Although coordinated opportunities to engage in critical inquiry work across k-16 contexts are rare, the authors believe that the knowledge, skills and confidence they gained through this professional inquiry sensitized them to oppressive curricular norms and expanded their repertoires of resistance.

The article focuses on the efforts of an elementary and middle school educator, Ashley Stanley, to cultivate sustainable futures through climate education. Topics include integrating climate change into the curriculum through diverse pathways such as literature and local activism, promoting curiosity and humility in teaching, and addressing students' emotional responses to climate issues.

As educators, we know that the struggle is at times all too real. Despite valiant attempts to string together successful lessons, units, and experiences, there are times when we fall [...]

We--Dr. Sandra L. Osorio (Illinois State University), Dr. Rebecca Woodard (University of Illinois at Chicago), Rick Coppola (Chicago Public Schools and University of Illinois at Chicago), and Dr. Kara Taylor [...]

The qualitative study shows how 20 teachers from 4 districts in the same state enacted mandated school-wide writing curricula. Analyses of the observations and interviews revealed that 4 teachers were faithfully following the district-adopted curriculum, 4 rejected it, and 12 teachers adapted the curriculum to meet their students' needs. The teachers who followed the curriculum had positive views of it but were inexperienced or uncomfortable teaching writing and had less access to professional development (PD) than teachers in other groups. Most of the teachers who adapted the curriculum were experienced teachers and felt supported in making changes due to the quality of PD. The teachers who rejected the curriculum were unhappy with the existing curriculum and drew from a number of different resources; however, their writing instruction lacked coherence and an underlying philosophy of writing. The findings show that factors such as policies, PD, and personal factors including previous writing experiences and philosophies influenced teachers' enactments. While previous studies have found that overarching policies including NCLB increase pressure on teachers resulting in a lack of autonomy, our findings explore the ways that teachers were able to navigate their school contexts.

Science education is often neglected in elementary teaching, where reading and math are highly tested and prioritized. But science provides one avenue to engage children's profound curiosity about their natural [...]

In this issue, we invited submissions about the linguistic resources of children. We hoped to learn about instructional practices that welcome the use of multiple languages and dialects in the [...]

We examine how culturally sustaining pedagogy that fosters linguistic and cultural pluralism might be taken up in writing instruction. Using data collected through semistructured interviews with nine urban elementary and middle school writing teachers, we document teachers' conceptualizations and enactments of culturally sustaining writing pedagogy. Findings indicate that these teachers tended to make space for explicit discussions of language, culture, and power in the writing curriculum and to problematize expressions of dominant culture, such as an emphasis on official languages. We also explore the tensions that these teachers experienced in their pedagogy while engaging in culturally sustaining methods; for example, we documented teachers' sense that writing needed to be more formal than speech and instances where their critical practices put them at odds with stakeholders in their schools. This work represents an emerging understanding of how culturally sustaining literacy pedagogy might be implemented in practice.

The article focuses on introducing readers to William Peek, a middle school humanities teacher in Chicago, who incorporates climate justice learning in his teaching. Topics include making glocal connections to understand local and global impacts of climate change, using texts to cultivate critical civic empathy, and layering interdisciplinary texts to support inquiry-based learning about urgent topics like climate justice.

In honor of this month's annual conference theme of !Suenos! Pursuing the light!, we offer this unthemed issue exploring some of the ways educators are 'growing out of the dark [...]

Using ethnographic methods, this article looks closely at how a team of first-grade teachers and digital media artists in an urban elementary school used video in innovative ways during professional development over the course of one year. Extending a body of literature that primarily documents how video can be used as a tool in professional development to develop pedagogical knowledge and support reflective practice, this article documents how teachers in this partnership also consumed, connected through, and created videos to deepen digital media content knowledge and showcase their teaching and learning with a broader audience as part of a school-wide culture that attempted to create a "new ethos" (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007) of digital media arts mindsets.

The article introduces a three-part series focused on climate justice learning in elementary and middle school English language arts (ELA) classrooms. Topics include inspiring young learners' love for the Earth, utilizing picturebooks as conversation and action catalysts, and emphasizing the importance of building educators' climate knowledge through literature and direct experiences with nature.

The Common Core State Standards advocate more writing than previous standards; however, in taking a college and career readiness perspective, the Standards neglect to emphasize the role of context and culture in learning to write. We argue that sociocultural perspectives that pay attention to these factors offer insights into how to interpret and implement the Standards in more meaningful ways. This article shares sociocultural research to elaborate on--and, in some cases, contest--the writing and language Standards and to support teachers in three key pedagogical shifts: from "text types and purposes" to genre, from "technology to produce and publish" to new media literacies, and from "conventions and standard English" to asset-based perspectives on grammar and language use. By critically examining both explicit and implied messages in the Standards, we invite educators to interrogate documents and mandates that inform instructional practices, a cornerstone of our profession.