Janet Alsup

Teaching Literature in an Age of Text Complexity.

The recently released Common Core State Standards increase classroom emphasis on informational texts in high school and recommend a three-part measurement for text complexity when selecting texts for classroom use. In this commentary I argue that fictional narratives can not only meet these stated criteria for complex texts and result in critical thinking, reading, and writing, but stories can also lead to increased reader engagement and feelings of empathy for others.

English Education Students and Professional Identity Development: Using Narrative and Metaphor to Challenge Preexisting Ideologies

During my six years as an English educator, I have seen many preservice teachers express confidence in their ability to teach secondary school English early in their undergraduate programs. This confidence, while not always misplaced or inappropriate, can mask a lack of critical understanding of effective pedagogy, especially when it is based on the students’ memories of their school experiences, which my students intend to replicate in their own classrooms. Often, their personal histories have become foundational narrative ideologies on which their teaching philosophies are built. Many educational researchers and theorists believe, in fact, that personal histories can have a more powerful effect on the beliefs and practices of preservice and new teachers than university courses (see Lortie 1975; Crow 1987a, 1987b; Ross 1987; Britzman 1991; Holt-Reynolds 1992; Knowles 1992). Others find that teacher education courses can promote the development of preservice teachers’ professional identities if they ask the students to examine critically or interrogate their personal histories for evidence of what constitutes a good teacher and what the job of teaching entails (see Knowles and Holt-Reynolds 1991; Bullough and Stokes 1994; Tillema 1998). To engage my students in such critical examination, I have developed two assignments for a course titled “The Teaching of Literature in the Secondary Schools.” I call these assignments the “pedagogical discussion assignment” and the “photographic philosophies assignment.” The first assignment

The Difficulty of Teacher Dispositions: Considering Professional Dispositions for Preservice English Teachers

This article explores the place of teacher dispositions in English teacher preparation by contextualizing the issue of dispositions in English teacher preparation. This allows consideration for the importance of developing professional dispositions during English teacher preparation by recognizing that various stakeholders (teacher educators, university supervisors, mentor teachers, and preservice teachers) in teacher education often understand dispositions differently. The authors reflect and offer suggestions on how professional dispositions might be more effectively addressed in an English teacher education program through richer interactions among all stakeholders.

Rethinking the meaning of difference: Contemporary challenges for researchers and practitioners in literacy and language education

Book reviewed in this article: Handbook of Language and Literacy: Development and Disorders. Edited by C. Addison Stone, Elaine R. Silliman, Barbara J. Ehren, & Kenn Apel. 2004.

Contextualizing Critical Pedagogy

In Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English, James A. Berlin (1996) devotes several pages to critical pedagogy and its influence on the teaching of composition. Berlin credits Paulo Freire as the originator of the idea of “critical literacy” and cites Jennifer M. Gore and Elizabeth Ellsworth as two postmodern critical pedagogues who critique and update Freire’s work. Berlin, along with Gore and Ellsworth, places Freire “within a postmodern frame” and urges literacy educators to teach their students to “name the world” (101) as they experience it and, by doing so, take control of their lives. I agree with Berlin’s assessment of the work of Freire, Gore, and Ellsworth, but to his list of postmodern critical pedagogues I would add Amy Lee. In her first book, Composing Critical Pedagogies: Teaching Writing as Revision, Lee does not claim to provide a set of “procedures” or directions to follow to become the critical writing teacher, but she does provide a vivid portrait of one such teacher (herself ) at one university who is continually “(re) learning to teach”: “I do not aim to present the new and improved vision of critical pedagogy so much as I aim to provide a reflexive, critical portfolio of one teacher’s (ongoing) process of coming to a specific version of critical pedagogy in the teaching of writing” (5). Composing Critical Pedagogies was published in March 2000 as part of the National Council of Teachers of English’s series Refiguring English Stud-

Teacher Identity Discourse as Identity Growth: Stories of Authority and Vulnerability

In this chapter I describes the results of a qualitative, interview-based study exploring the teacher identity development of six female English education pre-service teachers at a large Midwestern university in 2016. I focus on the discourse of Teresa, one of the six students in the study. Her stories exemplify one of the key findings: a new generation of student teachers engaged in much narrative discourse, and by association identity work, related to their often conflicting understandings of professional enactments of authority and vulnerability. I also includes examples of instances when Teresa engaged in meaningful identity work by voicing “narratives of balance” between these two poles of subjectivity. Through these stories of balance, Teresa begins to negotiate ‘conceptions of self and other’ that, as a young student teacher, often result in cognitive and affective dissonance. Such negotiation results in more complex and comprehensive understandings of student-teacher and teacher-mentor relationships, and, hence, professional identity growth.