Teaching, Curriculum and Educational Inquiry

This review of literature highlights the efforts teacher educators and researchers have made over the past 18 years to work toward social justice in secondary English language arts (ELA) preservice teacher (PT) education. Drawing on Dantley and Green’s framework for social justice leadership, we highlight the work that teacher educators have engaged in to support secondary ELA PTs in developing (a) indignation/anger for justice through exploring beliefs about students and themselves, (b) a prophetic and historical imagination through broadening understandings about teaching and learning, and (c) accountability to students and communities through university-to-classroom transitions. We close this article by drawing on this framework to honor what we, as a field, have accomplished while acknowledging the efforts that still need to be made in working toward justice in secondary ELA PT education and, ultimately, in the schools and communities in which our PTs teach.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has been a laboratory for privatization and school choice through a neoliberal market model put in place in the 1990s. Every year, the District rates schools based on the School Quality Rating Policy (SQRP), and those results are made public through the CPS data portal and other media outlets. Using the method and theory of critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011, 2014), I analyzed the principals' discourse of the CPS-run high schools rated 1+ in the 2017-2018 school year. Specifically, I illustrate how the language principals use on their school websites' welcome messages is used to further neoliberal initiatives through business-classified discourses, reproduction of the SQRP language, and school positioning statements which classify the schools in the school choice hierarchy.

HBO’sThe  Wire(2002–2008) is often regarded as one of the best television shows ever aired. Through reiterative viewings and a critical content analysis of the show, I argue thatThe Wires should be used as an anchor text in preservice English education courses in order to foster cosmopolitan literacies in preservice English teachers. I offer that viewingThe  Wire in its entirety, coupled with a bioecological adolescent development frame as well as ethical and moral considerations toward biases toward the Other could offer preservice English teachers the critical space to unpack their biases before entering the classroom. I posit that The  Wire could serve to foster the educational cosmopolitanism tenets of criticality, historicity, dialogicity, and reflexivity in future English teachers.

This conceptual research paper explores educational reformation through the theoretical work of Appadurai (1996) and Castells (2000) in the flows and connectivity of global networks. It discusses the global, national, and local effects of the neoliberal ideological reformations in education and their effects on the African American student population from underserved communities, specifically drawing from the author’s experience as a high school teacher in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Competition between nation-states and the creation of a so-called model minority have led to arise in accountability measures in education, resulting in a high-stakes testing regime. The unintended negative consequences of these reforma-tions belie the educational preparation for a student in the global sphere, leading to the further marginalization of African American students in underserved communities.

In today's educational landscape, especially in metropolitan areas such as Chicago, the market model has opened up spaces for charter school networks and other private and public enterprises to develop alternatives to the traditional public school model. The Urban Preparation Charter School Network is an example of a "gap in the market" that was filled by CEO Tim King, who, in 2006, created an all-male, African American high school experience with the mission to provide a high-quality, comprehensive education which would afford students success in college. Urban Preparation, by Chezare A. Warren (2017), assistant professor of teacher education at Michigan State University, is the qualitative, phenomenological study that arose from his experience with this school and its students. The book draws from the Urban Prep College Persistence Study (UPCPS), in which Warren and sociologist Derrick Brooms aimed to see "what works" in improving Black men and boys' educational outcomes. Part of Harvard Education Press's Race and Education series, the foreword by H. Richard Milner IV situates this book as one that will "advance a critical, forward-thinking body of research on race that contributes to policy, theory, practice, and action" (Milner, 2017, p. vii), and Urban Preparation is very close to delivering on the series' promise. Warren (2017) highlights the lived experiences of 17 young, Black men from the South Side of Chicago, their choice to attend UP, their experiences as students in the charter school, and through graduation from a 4-year university. Warren, a former math teacher in the inaugural year of UP, seeks to answer his research question: What factors do members of UP's inaugural graduating class, on track to complete their undergraduate degrees within 6 years of initial enrollment, describe as most significant to determining their educational trajectories from Chicago's South Side to and through a 4-year college or university? Through his analysis, Warren (2017) adds to the 817335U EXXXX10.1177/0042085918817335Urban EducationBook Review

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has been a laboratory for privatization and school choice through a neoliberal market model put in place in the 1990s. Every year, the District rates schools based on the School Quality Rating Policy (SQRP), and those results are made public through the CPS data portal and other media outlets. Using the method and theory of critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011, 2014), I analyzed the principals' discourse of the CPS-run high schools rated 1+ in the 2017-2018 school year. Specifically, I illustrate how the language principals use on their school websites' welcome messages is used to further neoliberal initiatives through business-classified discourses, reproduction of the SQRP language, and school positioning statements which classify the schools in the school choice hierarchy.

HBO's The Wire (2002-2008) is often regarded as one of the best television shows ever aired. Through reiterative viewings and a critical content analysis of the show, Iargue that The Wire should be used as an anchor text in preservice English education courses in order to foster cosmopolitan literacies in preservice English teachers. I offer that viewing The Wire in its entirety, coupled with a bioecological adolescent development frame as well as ethical and moral considerations toward biases toward the Other could offer preservice English teachers the critical space to unpack their biases before entering the classroom. I posit that The Wire could serve to foster the educational cosmopolitanism tenets of criticality, historicity, dialogicity, and reflexivity in future English teachers.

The purpose of this qualitative participatory research study was to explore what happens when English language arts (ELA) preservice teachers collaborate to develop multimodal, intersectional, and critical feminist empowerment literacy curricula. This study centered on the following research question: How do ELA preservice teachers make sense of how pop-cultural, multimodal texts such as VSCO stickers frame girlhood and womanhood? Multiple data were collected: audio and video recording transcripts of monthly Saturday workshops, artifacts, such as curriculum writing and workshop photographs, researcher journals, analytic memos, and a shared Google Drive of written student thinking. The constant comparative method was used to analyze and triangulate the data. Analyses of data revealed that preservice teachers were able to critically analyze consumerism relating to VSCO stickers and girlhood and were able to notice how stickers typecast and reify individualism while also navigating authenticity during self-selection and categorizing stickers. Additionally, data analysis demonstrated how critical literacies played a role in the preservice teachers' understanding of how several groups, communities, and individual voices were not recognized in the marketing and consumption of VSCO sticker packaging as well as providing additional gender biases in society.

Purpose – This paper aims to explore recent research (2007-2017) on the implementation of multimodal writing instruction in secondary English courses. It seeks to highlight the varied ways in which theoretical conceptions of multimodality have been implemented in writing instruction and the impacts of these implementations on students' experiences in classrooms.
Design/methodology/approach – The author used a keyword search of relevant academic databases to identity articles within the search parameters. This was followed by bibliographic branching to identify additional articles and two rounds of open coding to identify themes for analysis.
Findings – The literature revealed a diversity of approaches to incorporating multimodal writing in classrooms; teachers mixed modalities within assignments, paired writing in print with multimodal composition and redesigned entire units or courses around multimodality. Studies showed the impact of multimodality on student learning through shifts in conceptions of communication, increases in student engagement, composition for real audiences and an increased role for students’ interests and identities.
Practical implications – This review has implications for teachers and researchers interested in developing multimodal writing curricula. It highlights the specific ways in which multimodal writing can be incorporated into instruction and the changes in student learning that result from this shift.
Originality/value – While theoretical writing on multimodality is abundant, multiple researchers have noted the difficulty of finding research on classroom implementations of multimodality (Howell et al., 2017; Smith, 2017). This review is intended to address this difficulty by contributing to a body of literature that teachers and scholars can draw on as they conceptualize and design multimodal writing experiences for students in the future.

This review of literature highlights the efforts teacher educators and researchers have made over the past 18 years to work toward social justice in secondary English language arts (ELA) preservice teacher (PT) education. Drawing on Dantley and Green’s framework for social justice leadership, we highlight the work that teacher educators have engaged in to support secondary ELA PTs in developing (a) indignation/anger for justice through exploring beliefs about students and themselves, (b) a prophetic and historical imagination through broadening understandings about teaching and learning, and (c) accountability to students and communities through university-to-classroom transitions. We close this article by drawing on this framework to honor what we, as a field, have accomplished while acknowledging the efforts that still need to be made in working toward justice in secondary ELA PT education and, ultimately, in the schools and communities in which our PTs teach.

This article explores the ways in which transmediation (Suhor, 1984), the translation of meaning from one sign system into another, can support students in developing their confidence and capabilities as readers. The author, a 10th grade English teacher, details a literature workshop (Blau, 2003) unit in which students worked collaboratively to develop reading strategies, utilizing the arts as a central means of comprehending text. This approach to reading instruction, refined over the course of three years, mixes artmaking with metacognitive reading comprehension strategies as students create a variety of informal and formal multimodal texts in response to literature. By creating artistic renderings of their readings, students gained windows into their own reading processes and the reading processes of their peers. The author argues that infusing multimodal elements into reading instruction can support students in becoming aware of their own transactional reading processes and empower them to tackle challenging texts.