Unpacking The Loaded Teacher Matrix

What issues in English teacher education are sidestepped because they are too loaded to address? What aren't we talking about when we discuss classroom management, censorship, standardized tests, media literacy, social justice issues, the standards, and technology? What really matters to novices entering the profession? The authors in this book wrestle with the disparities between preservice English teacher instruction and secondary school space as the two collide, and describe the tools that preservice English teachers need to negotiate and navigate between theory and practice. This book answers these questions and offers groundbreaking insights about liberatory pedagogy for how teacher educators can mentor preservice teachers on touchy issues, providing them with tools to reach today's students.

This reader demands that we understand diversity and multiculturalism by identifying the ways in which curriculum has been written and taught, and by redefining the field with an equitable lens, freeing it from the dominant cultural curriculum. The book problematizes the issue of whiteness, for instance, as not being the opposite of blackness or «person-of-colorness», but rather a meta-description for our dominant culture. Issues are also addressed that are usually left out of the discussion about diversity and multiculturalism: this reader includes essays on physical diversity, geographic diversity, and difference in sexualities. This is the quintessential collection of work by critical scholars committed to redefining the conversation on multiculturalism and diversity.

Today’s classrooms present a variety of challenges for teachers, many of which result from unanticipated, unpredictable events, from minor to serious. This collection of teacher narratives highlights several of these challenges with subsequent reflections and commentaries that invite conversations about aspects of teaching that often remain unacknowledged in educator preparation programs but that can have deleterious effects on the implementation of the pedagogical content knowledge that is promoted in these programs. Thinking Like a Teacher: Preparing New Teachersfor Today’s Classrooms aims to address this gap in educator preparation programs through sharing and affirming teachers’ voices as sources of pedagogical knowledge. Engagement with the narratives included in this collection will help teacher candidates perceive and think about teaching in new ways as they make the transition from instructional consumers to instructional leaders while simultaneously forging a new professional identity.

This book documents how preservice and inservice English teachers negotiate the transfer of the social justice pedagogies they learn in university methods classes to their own work as beginning full-time teachers. Based on a set of teacher narratives, this critical and evidence-based view of English teachers' interpretations of, responses to, and embodiments of social justice explores the complex shifts and concessions that English teachers often make when transitioning between preservice and inservice spaces - shifts which cause teachers to embrace and negotiate a social justice agenda in their classrooms, or for some, to modify, or even abandon it altogether. This work also offers a fresh perspective on the specific, context-dependent pathways and mechanisms through which English teachers enter school culture and respond to their own racial, sexual, and financial positions in relation to the gendered, raced, and classed positions of their schools, students, and classrooms. The book will be useful to social justice researchers, English teacher educators, inservice and preservice teachers, policymakers, cross-disciplinary teacher education fields, and interdisciplinary audiences, particularly in the fields of anthropology, sociology of education, philosophy, and cultural studies.

Media is rapidly evolving, from social media to news channels, individuals are being bombarded with headlines, new technologies, and varying opinions. Teaching the next generation of communication professionals how to interact with varying forms of media is paramount as they will be the future distributors of news and information. The Handbook of Research on Media Literacy in Higher Education Environments provides emerging research on the role of journalism and mass communication education in the digital era. While highlighting topics such as community media labs, political cognition, and public engagement, this publication explores the impact of globalization and a changing and diversified world within the realm of higher education. This publication is an important resource for educators, academicians, professionals, and researchers seeking current research on applications and strategies in promoting media and digital studies in higher education.

The Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts, Volume II brings together state-of-the-art research and practice on the evolving view of literacy as encompassing not only reading, writing, speaking, and listening, but also the multiple ways through which learners gain access to knowledge and skills. It forefronts as central to literacy education the visual, communicative, and performative arts, and the extent to which all of the technologies that have vastly expanded the meanings and uses of literacy originate and evolve through the skills and interests of the young. A project of the International Reading Association, published and distributed by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Visit http://www.reading.org for more information about Internationl Reading Associationbooks, membership, and other services.

Winner of the 2018 Outstanding Book by the Michigan Council Teachers of English Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2018 Winner of the 2017 AERA Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education) Exemplary Research Award This book draws upon a queer literacy framework to map out examples for teaching literacy across pre-K-12 schooling. To date, there are no comprehensive Pre-K-12 texts for literacy teacher educators and theorists to use to show successful models of how practicing classroom teachers affirm differential (a)gender bodied realities across curriculum and schooling practices. This book aims to highlight how these enactments can be made readily conscious to teachers as a reminder that gender normativity has established violent and unstable social and educational climates for the millennial generation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, (a)gender/(a)sexual, gender creative, and questioning youth.

Taking a close look at the forces that affect English education in schools—at the ways literature, cognitive science, the privileging of the STEM disciplines, and current educational policies are connected—this timely book counters with a strong argument for the importance of continuing to teach literature in middle and secondary classrooms. The case is made through critical examination of the ongoing "culture wars" between the humanities and the sciences, recent research in cognitive literary studies demonstrating the power of narrative reading, and an analysis of educational trends that have marginalized literature teaching in the U.S., including standards-based and scripted curricula. The book is distinctive in presenting both a synthesis of arguments for literary study in the middle and high school and sample lesson plans from practicing teachers exemplifying how literature can positively influence adolescents’ intellectual, emotional, and social selves.