English Language Arts Curriculum Research Articles

Reading the Rural Queerly

In this article, we describe an interpretive framework for teachers and teacher educators to use when engaging with two areas of English language arts curriculum and research – ruralness and queerness – as they work alongside readers of young adult literature. Too often rural communities and queerness are characterized as opposed if not incompatible. This binary—i.e., urban-as-queer-affirming and rural-as-queerphobic—has become so common that queer theorists have developed the term metronormativity to name and interrogate this ideology (Halberstam, 2005; Gray, 2009; Herring, 2010). Having lived and taught in rural and small town communities, we are concerned that metronormativity can, at times, go unrecognized if not uninterrogated in educational research. By offering a framework for teaching and analyzing literature in classrooms and teacher education classrooms, we encourage readers of queer young adult literature to ask questions about how and why ideas about spaces and sexualities become naturalized ideologies that are accepted as truth. Such questions matter not only for queer youth in rural contexts. Instead, they offer productive ways to think about literature and its relationships to life for readers in urban, suburban, and other contexts regardless of their sexual identities.

Reflection and projection: Inclusive and diverse texts in the English Language Arts curriculum

AbstractEngaging students in the reading process is challenging when they are unable to connect to texts. It is important to provide inclusive and diverse texts (IDTs) in the language arts curriculum. To promote a positive reading experience, all students need to read IDTs with non‐stereotypical depictions of girls, women, people of Color, and more. This is challenging when obstacles such as limited resources, a lack of teacher preparation to meet challenges, and stakeholder opposition to “non‐traditional” literature may hinder educators' efforts to include IDTs. Using effective instructional strategies, increasing home and school literacy connections, and providing focused teacher training can help overcome these obstacles. Literary texts that reflect multiple identities will promote a more equitable representation of all students within the classroom community. This paper discusses possible strategies and approaches for including and engaging with IDTs and resources educators can use to address instructional challenges and find high‐quality texts.

Revealing the Known: The Invisibilized Bias of Commercial Literacy Curricula

ABSTRACT A critical content analysis is employed to scrutinize the second-grade materials within EL education’s English language arts curriculum. Applying critical race theory, this study confronts the pervasive anti-Black narrative embedded in standardized curriculum used in the United States. The study unveils the presence of this narrative in the materials while advocating strategies for teachers obligated to use these resources. The aim is to empower educators to foster critical engagement among students, encouraging them to craft their counternarrative while actively advocating for an antiracist curriculum. The elementary literacy curricula widely employed across the United States tend to propagate a White-centric agenda. Despite attempts to veil biases and racism, these curricula subtly reinforce White privilege through practices such as colorblindness, context-neutral settings, and the perpetuation of the myth of meritocracy. To counter this, a community-centered approach to education is proposed. This approach challenges the entrenched power structures of White supremacy by supplementing mandated scripted curriculum with additional resources and diverse perspectives that authentically incorporate the lived experiences of Black students, families, and experts. This study underscores the urgent need to address the inherent biases in educational materials, advocating for a pedagogical shift toward inclusivity and actively challenging the perpetuation of systemic racism in curriculum frameworks.

Teacher preparation through introducing Hateful Things: Using Jim Crow memorabilia to address issues of social justice

It is important to prepare middle level teacher candidates with the dispositions, content knowledge, and pedagogy needed to implement justice-oriented practices in middle level curriculum. This article explores using Hateful Things, a traveling exhibit curated by the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, to integrate issues of stereotypes, biases, and racism into middle grades curriculum. Specific lessons, strategies and resources for integrating the history of the Jim Crow era, stereotypes, and American racism in middle level English Language Arts curriculum are provided.

Curriculum-as-Assemblage: Transgressive (Re)Imaginings in English and Literacies

In the midst of multiple ongoing local and global crises, and persistently polarizing discourses about what should and should not be taught in classrooms and schools, we can draw inspiration and hope from thinking across boundaries to reimagine curriculum in English and literacies education. While curriculum has historically contributed to the gatekeeping and sorting of youth as well as perpetuating the status quo, it has also been transformative, expanding possibilities in how we think and express ourselves. In this essay, I examine how English language arts curricula have been and are currently defined, invoked, or imagined, highlighting how innovative research and practice across multiple sociopolitical and disciplinary boundaries can transform how curriculum is enacted and experienced. Drawing from assemblage theories, I present a curriculum-as-assemblage stance that renders visible the interrelatedness of such social, political, and socioeconomic discourses with the knowledges, identities, and literacies that are constructed and negotiated in the broader context of schooling. To illustrate what such a conceptualization can offer, I describe a practice approach to thinking about curriculum as it is enacted, experienced, and rhizomatically connected to the multiple identities and narratives of students and teachers. I argue that an interdisciplinary and transgressive stance toward English and literacies education can foster creative, inclusive, expansive, humanizing, justice-oriented, and joyful thinking forward about our field.

“Living in These Two Places Really Shaped My Life”: Examining Multimodal Playlist Assignments in Social Studies and Language Arts Methods Courses

In this article, the authors consider the use of a “Playlist of My Life Assignment” in helping social studies (SS) and English language arts (ELA) teacher candidates (TCs) conceptualize multimodal and humanizing SS and ELA curricula. The Playlist Assignment asked teacher candidates to center the music, texts, land, spaces, and places that are most important to them, and potentially relate these back to their own pedagogies as SS and ELA teachers. Taken from two qualitative studies of two teacher education courses at two separate, large research universities in the U.S. Southwest, this article examines teacher candidates’ understandings of their disciplines as humanizing and multimodal, and as centered in their and their students’ communities, through the Playlist Assignment. Data included the Playlist Assignment, curated by TCs in each methods course, and TCs’ class response journals. TCs offered profound texts they carried within them throughout their lives, demonstrating (1) their multimodal disruptions of the definition of a “text” and (2) the empowering and limiting effect of life texts for humanizing curricula. This work has implications for SS and ELA teacher educators interested in supporting teacher candidates as they conceptualize multimodal and humanizing curricula with and for their future students.

Leveraging School and University Partnerships to Provide Accelerated English Language Arts Instruction to Gifted and High Potential Middle School Learners

Project OCCAMS is an accelerated English language arts curriculum and delivery model for high ability middle school learners. This program was initially developed in a research-practitioner partnership with two universities and a state department of education. Over 6 years, it was implemented in Columbus City Schools, Ohio’s largest urban school district, through careful collaboration with the district’s gifted department and other district teams responsible for day-to-day school operations. This article explores strategies for establishing and sustaining partnerships among organizations, both externally and internally, to develop innovative programs to benefit gifted students, such as those developed during Project OCCAMS.

Planning Professional Learning to Support the Implementation of a New English Language Arts Program for Middle School Students

A critical part of implementing a new instructional program is professional learning. Multifaceted training was planned and delivered to teachers in a Midwestern urban school district prior to and during implementation of an online accelerated English language arts curriculum in four middle schools. Working in partnership with two universities, district teachers were trained to utilize the Integrated Curriculum Model as well as practical training in navigating the Schoology online learning platform. During a 3-year period, teachers engaged in additional professional learning related to curriculum and instruction, assessment, and online teaching pedagogy in both a workshop and consultative format. This article summarizes the approaches used in this professional learning plan and lessons learned for future applications.

Care-Full Curricular Conversations: Conversation Pathways to Stronger indigenous representation in english Language Arts Classrooms

Using a question-and-answer format, a group of Native American teachers and scholars collaborated to share tools and resources for integrating Native voices into English language arts curricula.

Reading the Word, Not the World: A Critical Analysis of Close Reading

This article critically analyzes a Common Core-aligned English Language Arts curriculum with particular attention paid to the ways in which it constructs docile subjects in and through literate practices. Through a critical reading and content analysis of this textbook--one that the author was required to teach to her eighth grade students--this paper argues that under the guise of “college and career readiness,” the curriculum contained within the textbook represents a neoliberal approach to literary criticism, one whose ideology is evident through the material practices of “close reading” and in the disciplinary methods it employs in teaching students the “correct” way to read a text. In so doing, students become participants in a mass standardization effort that ultimately works to distort the myriad manifestations of power in K-12 public education today.

Embedding learning goals into secondary literacy curriculum: Assessing and implementing teachers' feedback

AbstractFocusing on a large study of the implementation of secondary English Language Arts curriculum in California and Washington, we assess how teachers use learning goals to support students developing expert learning practices. Highlighting the value of goal setting to support students' agency in learning to write, we describe teachers' reasons for not teaching these strategies more than any other aspect of the curriculum, as well as highlight the strategies of teachers who made learning goals meaningful. We ultimately offer the cycle for cultivating expert learners as a possible solution for professional development to better support goal setting through curricular planning.

Digital Literacy (Still) Can’t Wait: Renewing and Reframing the Conversation

A decade after their EJ article arguing for digital literacy to become a standard element of the English language arts curriculum, Turner and Hicks felt it was time to renew that call.

Playful Multiliteracies: Fan‐Based Literacies' Role in English Language Arts Pedagogy

AbstractStandards and their corresponding assessments have continued to narrow English language arts (ELA) curricula, pushing more playful, creative composition to the margins or to out‐of‐school pursuits. Simultaneously, students enjoy writing creatively in many extracurricular spaces and activities, like fanfiction. Building from research showing that fan‐based literacies align with ELA curriculum, this collective case study explores how three secondary ELA teachers incorporated their professional learning about fandoms into their classrooms. Framed in multiliteracies and theories of play, qualitative data generated through interviews, surveys, and artifact collection were iteratively analyzed to establish themes that illuminate how these teachers valued fan‐based literacies within their curricula. Findings reveal teacher perspectives about fanfiction's role in fostering analytic reading of texts, cultivating creative responses to literature, scaffolding essay writing about real questions, and engaging students in the work of ELA. An argument for centering playful reading and writing in classrooms is presented.

Overwhelming whiteness: a critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum

ABSTRACT Teachers in the US are increasingly required to use scripted curricula. Such instructional materials often reflect the overwhelming whiteness of the publishing industry through a lack of representation of authors and protagonists outside of white, middle-class normative characters. Implementation of such curricula stands in direct contrast to studies finding that culturally relevant pedagogy and curricula benefit students across racial and ethnic groups. This paper describes a qualitative analysis of the scripted Wit and Wisdom English Language Arts curriculum for grades K-8 guided by the research question: How might the curriculum reproduce a white supremacist master script? Following a quantitative analysis of racial representation across all core and supplementary texts in the curriculum, the research team used guiding questions grounded in a critical discourse and anti-racist teaching framework to qualitatively analyse teacher-facing materials at each grade level. The findings of this study indicate that whiteness is centred at every level of the curriculum in text selection and thematic grouping of texts, as well as through discursive moves in teacher-facing materials (e.g. essential questions for learning modules). Based on the findings, the research team suggests mechanisms for individual and collective efforts to resist whiteness-centred curricula at the system, school, and classroom level.

What Happens When Poetry Teaches?

Poetry means different things to different people. This article examines poetry as a genre of literature where writers deliberately select words and artfully arrange them in such a way that they paint vivid images on the canvas of the reader’s mind. It notes that some schools neglect to include poetry as a part of the English Language Arts curriculum, and that even when it is included, there is an imbalance between teaching prose and poetry, and classrooms are fraught with fledgling uninspired teachers fumbling to get students engaged in this neglected literary form. The writer makes the case that by employing innovative best practices in their lessons, educators should create opportunities for students to read, memorize, write, appreciate, and analyze poems. In taking the stance that poetry is an avenue to thinking and making inferences, the article makes the point that training the minds of the students to “dig deeper” will build higher-order thinking skills, an attitude that will be transferred to other areas of the curriculum. It calls for teachers to model and be enthusiastic about teaching poetry.

Language Curriculum in America and Indonesia: A Comparative Analysis for Improvement of Indonesian Character Education Practice

This article explores the U.S. English Language Arts Curriculum and Indonesian Language and Literature Curriculum. A comparative analysis is drawn to investigate ideological, cultural, and political economy factors that influence the development of both curricula. In addition, the educational purposes and philosophies that support both curricula are also exposed. Specifically, the discussion of the unstated purposes of the curricula shows an interesting finding. Language and literature curriculum of both countries highlight the importance of citizenship and character education and are integrated in the teaching of the curricula. However, the US language curriculum places a premium on fostering American identity, with an emphasis on increasing learning for professional workforce and career-ready individuals, which will benefit the global economy in the future. Meanwhile, Indonesian language curriculum gives priority to moral and religious instruction. The language and literature teaching are integrated in nation’s character building. After analyzing, comparing, and contrasting both curricula, the author found that America successfully instills character education to shape the worldview and characters of its citizens extracted from their clear ideology, while Indonesia is somewhat inexplicable and vague. Therefore, this article shows room for improvement for educators and educational leaders in Indonesia to be clearer in defining which character is best exposed in the curriculum.

Collaborative Inquiry in Digital Information Environments

This paper presents selected findings from current research being undertaken by the Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries (CISSL) at Rutgers University that examines the research and writing processes of high school students undertaking a group research task in a New Jersey High school library. The purpose of this task was for students to produce a co-constructed product that represents the group’s understanding of their chosen curriculum topic. The study involved 42 grade 9 students undertaking an accelerated English Language Arts curriculum unit focusing on examining a wide range of challenging literature in the genres of short story, novel, drama, nonfiction, and poetry. The course includes independent reading assignments, and stresses critical thinking and speaking skills, study skills, and research strategies. The learning environment was supported by a Wiki/ Google documents digital environment that tracked the group dynamics, student-to-student interactions, resource use patterns, and knowledge building processes, as well as classroom teacher and school librarian interactions with the students, as groups and as individuals. This paper reports specifically on cognitive, personal and interpersonal dynamics reported by students as they worked in groups.

Review of English Language Arts Curriculum based on the Credit System of U.S. High Schools - Implications for the Curriculum of Korean Language Electives -

Review of English Language Arts Curriculum based on the Credit System of U.S. High Schools - Implications for the Curriculum of Korean Language Electives -

Building Content Knowledge to Boost Comprehension in the Primary Grades

ABSTRACTWell‐established theoretical models and a body of empirical research elucidate the critical role of content knowledge in comprehending texts. However, the potential of supporting knowledge in service of enhancing linguistic and reading comprehension has been a relatively neglected topic in the science of reading. The authors explicate why knowledge building in English language arts instruction (i.e., content‐rich instruction) can support language and content knowledge, leading to better linguistic and reading comprehension, based on theoretical arguments and empirical studies. In particular, the authors review the evidence on this claim, paying special attention to experimental trials conducted in K–2 settings. The authors also share preliminary findings from a novel intervention study testing one instantiation of a widely used content‐rich English language arts curriculum. Whereas this growing literature base demonstrates evidence of promise, further rigorous trials are needed to examine the efficacy of this integrative approach to teaching reading for understanding.

The Humilitant Pedagogue: An Invitation to a Refractive Curricular Encounter

The purpose of this auto-ethnographic study will be to explore and understand more fully how my experience of two educational events helped me discern between empty schooling and an educational education. I consider the theories of French philosopher Alain Badiou and their implications for English language arts curriculum and pedagogy. I hope to articulate what I will call a refractive curricular encounter as a contribution living within the traditions of reconceptualist curriculum theory, critical pedagogy and literary engagement. Such a refractive curricular encounter suggests breaking away from a given trajectory or set of coordinates; Badiou’s event does not interrupt or halt the world so much as interrupt the taken for granted knowledge and opinions, allowing the possibility of truths to emerge. As such, interruption is not static; interruption is vital and alive! I examine these truthful interruptions with a view to better understanding how neoliberal culture infiltrates my being so deeply as to have rendered my neoliberal and authoritarian urges invisible to me. My study also offers fruitful considerations for like-minded educators: how might framing education within an invitational context offer the possibility for an eventful-encounter to occur? Secondly, where Badiou suggests that the response to the emergent truth process ought to be one of a militant fidelity, I suggest that educators instead assume a disposition of what I call the humilitant teacher—a portmanteau of humility and militant. This paper explores the intersections of these notions and how they might offer insights into what it means to educate educationally.