Editors’ Introduction
In the final issue of 2019 for English Teaching: Practice and Critique, we present seven articles that complicate our understandings of everyday facets of English Language Arts teachers’ work, including teacher resilience and agency, academic reading and writing and student discussions. As is often the case with issues of English Teaching: Practice and Critique, these articles represent a variety of methodological approaches and settings but all provide critical insights into the teaching of English literacy.
In “Emerging theory of teacher resilience: a situational analysis,” Sally Drew and Cathy Sosnowski propose a new theory of teacher resilience that focused on the relationship between constraining or “risk” factors that lead to burnout and enabling or “protective” factors that help teachers thrive in a complex, difficult profession. Drawing on interviews with 33 English Language Arts teachers in the USA, the authors make a number of significant observations about teacher resilience, including that resilient teachers draw from a sense of purpose and school community; embrace uncertainty, reframing negative experiences into learning experiences; and use relationships with colleagues, students and school leaders to endure challenges. From these findings, Drew and Sosnowski theorize a dynamic interaction between internal and external enabling and constraining factors that contribute to more complex understandings of teacher resilience and provide guidance for designing effective support and mentoring programs for ELA teachers.
Lee Jin Choi’s article, “Sociocultural research on L2 reading in L1 settings: a critical review on the past thirty years,” provides a timely review of current research on language learners’ reading development. Focusing on the L2 reading of upper elementary, middle and high school students in L1 settings, this review critically explores 91 studies published in the past three decades from a sociocultural perspective. Choi identifies three major shifts during that time:
a shift from monolingual/L1-based research to multilingual/L2-based research;
the development of socially situated models of literacies; and
the application of sociocultural and critical lenses to L2 reading development and assessment.
Choi recommends that future research acknowledge the continua of L1 and L2 reading, engage in macro-micro analysis of L2 reading contexts and diversify participants, approaches and settings in L2 reading research.
Beth Krone’s article, “Embodied refusal and choreographic criticalities: Seventh grade boys of color writing ‘Mute,’” uses a Black feminist theoretical framework to describe and analyze the work of a group of middle school boys in the USA in a superhero storytelling project. Drawing on an ethnographic data set, Krone constructs a narrative focused on the group’s use of embodiment and choreography in their creation of a faceless, voiceless superhero that responds to larger social narratives and refuses normative readings. This study provides key implications for literacy pedagogy that allows for “restor(y)ing Black boyhood”.
In “The language of teacher agency in an eighth grade ELA classroom,” Adam Loretto uses ecological models of agency to examine how an eighth-grade teacher in the USA enacted agency in four instructional moments. Focusing on the language use, Loretto finds that the teacher’s language in each instructional moment reveals a variety of influences and commitments including his own personal beliefs about learning, and external factors related to standards and assessment. This article offers methodological implications for studies of ELA teacher’s instructional agency and practical implications for assessing instructional agency.
Christopher Wagner, Marcela Ossa Parra and Patrick C. Porter examine teacher agency in professional development in their article, “Teacher agency in a multiyear professional development collaborative.” This article focuses on the ways in which teachers chose to engage in a long-term professional development collaboration focused on teaching multilingual learners and, subsequently, the extent to which engagement and agency in the collaboration fostered changes in their instructional practices and stances. Findings suggest that positive changes occurred over time, on a non-linear trajectory, and in situations where the teacher made active and engaged decisions regarding their participation in professional development. This article offers insights into the value of long-term professional development partnerships that center teacher agency.
Todd Reynolds’ article, “Like a conductor: whole-class discussion in the English classrooms,” contributes to scholarship on dialogic instruction in English language arts classrooms by examining what kinds of whole-class discussions happen when teachers choose to facilitate them. Drawing on data from four English language arts teachers’ classroom, Reynolds troubles the binary between monologic and dialogic discussion, illustrating how the teachers in his study maintained procedural control of discussion through discussion structures, while giving up interpretative control to their students. This article nuances the role of the teacher in whole-class discussion, illustrating the usefulness of procedural control in generating dialogic discussion.
Finally, in “The pedagogical utility of oral discussion versus collaborative drafting,” Laya Heidari Darani and Nafiseh Hosseinpour compared the effects of two student-centered activities on student writing in an Iranian EFL class – student-led oral discussion and small-group collaborative drafting. The authors find that both approaches led to improvements in the students’ writing skills, but collaborative drafting demonstrated stronger results. They hypothesize that the social nature of collaborative drafting, including the opportunities it provides for students to learn new strategies from peers and to test out their ideas and expectations, led to richer, ongoing discussions and more peer scaffolding than the student-led discussions. This article offers insights into the affordances of both student-centered discussion and collaborative drafting for specific aspects of academic writing and firmly positions academic literacy development as a sociocultural process.
