Section Introduction to Part II

Part II follows Dixon’s lead in the sense that it emphasizes the process of doing English language arts. Part II begins with a chapter by Amanda Haertling Thein, Richard Beach, and Anthony Johnston that explores the implications of teaching literature through an identity-focused framework. An identity-focused framework invites adolescents to approach literature in a more engaged manner, relating themes to who they are and how they see the world around them. Thein, Beach, and Johnston assert that most classes that use young adult literature employ a very developmental conception of adolescent identity. The authors then explain how a sociocultural approach, in contrast, emphasizes the relational component of identity-making. The chapter “Re-Positioning Youth in English Teacher Education,” by Robert Petrone and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides, extends the argument that the framing of adolescent identity is critical in the field of English language arts teacher education. Highlighting three ways that English teacher educators might facilitate prospective English teachers’ interrogation of dominant discourses of adolescence/ts, Petrone and Sarigianides emphasize that this interrogation will help prospective English teachers be better positioned to create pedagogical practices aligned with more comprehensive understandings of secondary students. This chapter also focuses on how youth, themselves, can be integrated into English teacher education coursework as guest speakers on a range of English and schooling practices, thereby being “re-positioned” as experts and contributors to English teacher education. The next chapter, the chapter “Beyond the Knowledge Economy: Teaching English for Economic Justice,” by Ross Collin, explores English language arts’ tradition of economic critique. Collin asserts that although economic critique has long had a role in ELA, it has seldom been seen as a way for teachers to pursue ELA’s economic mission of teaching forms of literacy that students can use to improve their economic positions. Collin introduces a way that ELA teachers can help students improve their economic positions by showing them (a) how to read and write about abuses of economic and political power and (b) how to work toward a more economically just society. The final chapter in Part II of the book, the chapter “From Research to Practice: Writing, Technology, and English Teacher Education,” by Jen Scott Curwood, Jayne C. Lammers, and Alecia Marie Magnifico, stresses the advantages of writing authentically and looking at youths’ writing “in the wild” (Curwood, Magnifico, & Lammers, 2013). Through drawing on their experiences as English teacher educators and as researchers of digital literacies and online affinity spaces, Curwood, Lammers, and Magnifico offer examples from three English teacher education programs in the United States and Australia to demonstrate a link between their research in out-of-school spaces to literacy practices in school contexts.