Engaging the Critical in English Education

Briana Asmus is an assistant professor of Education and ESL/Bilingual Program Director at Aquinas College. Prior to academia, she was a literacy consultant in migrant education, and taught English/ESL in South Korea, Japan, China, and the United States.Charles H. Gonzalez, PhD., an assistant professor of Curriculum and Instruction, has worked with diverse populations of pre-service teachers, public school students, and out-of-school youths for nearly two decades. His duties in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Austin Peay State University include teaching pedagogy and education courses. He has published research on multimodality, teacher education, and implementing digital video into ELA classrooms. His current work centers on discovering ways to encourage and support teachers to be culturally relevant and uncovering ways to develop new culturally sustaining pedagogies. He has been part of over twenty educational conference presentations.

• Acknowledgments – List of Contributors – Briana Asmus/Charles H. Gonzalez: What Is Social Justice to Teacher Education? A History of the Commission on Social Justice in Teacher Education Programs – Noah Asher Golden: Countering Reified Framings of Social Justice: Building Responsiveness through Dialogue – Allen Webb: The Climate Emergency and English Education – Nicole Sieben: Positioning Writing Hope as a Framework for Social Justice in English Education – Heather Hurst: "It’s Harder to Do It Here": Learning to Teach for Social Justice in a Rural English Education Course – Deborah Bieler: Designing an Equity-Oriented Undergraduate English Education Major – Kelly Byrne Bull: Preparing Teacher Candidates to Meet the Needs of English Language Learners: Social Justice as Foundation – Amy Vetter/Melissa Schieble/Kahdeidra Monét Martin/Terri Rodriguez: Framework for Critical Conversations as Social Justice Pedagogy in ELA Classrooms – Todd DeStigter: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and the Problem of Poverty: From Cultural Identity to Political Subjectivity – Index.

“For any English Education programs undergoing accreditation or program revision, this book traces the significant history of the field’s social justice standard, offering a range of examples of how its implementation could look. Effecting social justice through English teaching might involve: nationwide dialogue around shared provocative texts, addressing the climate emergency, truly teaching to multilingual students, naming and responding to race and racism, or ensuring that we devote attention to class differences. Rather than pick and choose one way to meet the standard, programs could incorporate a panoply of these approaches so that English classrooms cannot help but become the central site for social change.”—Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides, author (with Carlin Borsheim-Black) of Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction for White Students