This dissertation investigates the impact of attending a STEM-designated elementary school on students' math, ELA (English Language Arts), and science achievement and growth scores. As technology continues to advance in education, educators are exploring innovative instructional methods. With a concerning decline in math proficiency nationwide,…

The study investigates the impact of Roadmap-formatted curriculum on student reading growth in grades 3-5 in the Ypsilanti Community Schools (Ypsilanti, MI). Classrooms in grades 3-5 were divided into two groups: those using the Roadmap-formatted, commercially-provided curriculum and those using the same commercially-provided curriculum in…

Thinking at the nexus of epistemic injustice, childhood studies, transgender studies, and gender and racial justice in literacy education, this article illustrates how curricular engagement with questions of age, gender, race, and power can simultaneously complicate and flatten knowledge about power relations. Drawing from a yearlong ethnography…

Writing professional learning is often overlooked amidst public-school system demands, which include scarce funding and competing state mandates and priorities (Tooley and Connally, 2016). In addition, writing teachers are often subject to professional learning experiences that are directed by others rather than being tailored to their own needs…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the preservice educational narratives of Black English teachers in an effort to determine their experiences within teacher education programs with assigned white cooperating teachers. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing upon Black storytelling, testimony and breath in narrative analysis, this…

The ability to read, the single most important skill students need for learning, has been on the decline across the nation while student interest in books has also waned. Yet, despite the flagging interest in, and proficiency with, reading, English Language Arts (ELA) instruction has remained largely unchanged especially in grades 6-12. The…

Although interdisciplinary scholars have long debated the ethics of empathy, it continues to be widely seen as universal, prosocial, and reparative in education. Subject English, long associated with the work of producing civilised, moral and cultured students, is a critical locus for the activation of empathy. But what becomes of empathy in the…

Engaging 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…

Grade-level retention is a common educational practice with the goal of improving academic performance, but the evidence of its influence is mixed. This study examines the academic effect of repeating kindergarten, first grade, second grade, or third grade on English Language Arts performance at the end of fourth grade. This study also examines…

Informational reading instruction plays an important role in early literacy but has traditionally received less emphasis than literary text in elementary classrooms. This mixed-methods study illuminates trends from observed reading instruction of 77 first-year elementary teachers, drawing on data from 761 lesson segments scored with the Protocol…

Students face several challenges when asked to locate relevant and credible information from the internet. This article introduces three principles for designing online inquiry lessons and documents what we learned from five language arts teachers from Finland who implemented and provided feedback on a learning unit framed in those design…

Teacher perception has been demonstrated to be a key contributor to instructional practices within the classroom. As additional technologies become available to enhance and supplement instructional practices, game-based learning has emerged as an included component to classroom strategies for improved student achievement. With primary focus within…

Understanding global perspectives and international cultures is important because of increasing global mobility, digital connections, and national chauvinism. As students engage with diverse others in schools and online, they need global, critical, and ethical understandings of language, literacy, and culture. From a critical cosmopolitan lens,…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how evangelical teachers' religious identities influence their interpretation and teaching of texts in high school English Language Arts classrooms. Further, this paper examines how evangelical teachers make choices about how to balance the demands of their religious and teacher identities as they interact with…

Language-oriented literacy standards offer mostly linguistic accounts of text complexity. In response, the present article demonstrates that multimodal and visual narratives offer additional ways to understand and discuss text complexity. This descriptive analysis of one fourth-grader's comic provides an account of the multimodal patterns and…