Table of Contents
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Opening the Conversation: A Dialogue with Past Editors Ben Nelms and Michael Moore
Leslie S. Rush and Lisa Scherff
Abstract:
Current editors Leslie Rush and Lisa Scherff talk to past editors Ben Nelms and Michael Moore about ongoing issues in English education.
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“A Respect for the Past, a Knowledge of the Present, and a Concern for the Future”: The Role of History in English Education
P. L. Thomas
Abstract:
This article argues that ELA teacher candidates and inservice ELA teachers need historical perspectives in their coursework and their practice. Using the life and career of Lou LaBrant, the authorexamines the value of placing current practice in the context of practice throughout the history of the field of teaching ELA. Patterns examined in LaBrant’s life and work include the historicaltension between bureaucracy and teacher empowerment, back-to-basics movements, the roles of research and progressivism in the field of literacy, and the relationship between educational andsocial challenges. Further, the article examines avenues for teacher educators to become more connected with the history of the field.
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Emerging Practice for New Teachers: Creating Possibilities for “Aesthetic” Readings
Randi Dickson and Arthur Costigan
Abstract:
This article explores how exposure to aesthetic education approaches can help novice teachers reconsider their literature instruction in an age of mandated curricula and increased pressures to“teach to the test.” The guiding questions were as follows: What similarities exist between transacting with a text on the page and aesthetically engaging with other works of art, and could thesetheories and practices be brought into ELA classrooms? Through freewrites, reflective papers, and a final self-assessment, students documented both their initial resistances and their evolvingunderstandings of aesthetic education. We discovered that involving English education students in aesthetic experiences affected the ways many began to reimagine their classrooms, literacy/literature instruction, and education in general.
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Rejoining the Learning Circle: When Inservice Providers Conduct Research
Paul Rogers, Anne Elrod Whitney, Alison Bright, Rosemary Cabe, Tim Dewar, and Suzie Y. Null
Abstract:
In this article, a group of inservice providers and beginning researchers describe their experiences in learning to conduct evaluation research on a long-term school-university partnership program.We offer the practical lessons we learned in how to undertake such a study, and we share the immediate and powerful effects that the process of conducting the research had on the way we envisionand enact our inservice work. As the director of the inservice program noted, the problem we were addressing changed from “How can we convince others that we do good work?” to “How canwe make our work better?” This is a question at the heart of professional learning communities.
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Extending the Conversation: Writing Wounded: Trauma, Testimony, and Critical Witness in Literacy Classrooms
Elizabeth Dutro
Abstract:
Elizabeth Dutro emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the “hard stuff” of life in our classrooms.
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