Cori McKenzie

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a pedagogical innovation – a matrix constructionexercise – intended to help pre-service teachers (PTs) navigate the multiple and oftentimes competing
discourses that shape the school subject English Language Arts (ELA).
Design/methodology/approach – To explore the various ways the PTs drew on the discursivelyconstructed paradigms of ELA throughout their teacher preparation program, researchers (themselves teacher educators) conducted an intertextual analysis (Prior, 1995) of PTs’ classroom texts and interview transcripts.
Findings – The intertextual analysis suggested that PTs possessed knowledge of and investment in a range of discourses, which they used to anchor their own pedagogical and curricular decision-making
and to anticipate the leanings and ideologies of other stakeholders in ELA. Although the organizational schema of the matrix proved helpful from an orientation standpoint, it also may have disguised the productive tensions between particular discourses for some PTs.
Originality/value – Although scholars have long noted the plurality of the school subject English and some studies on innovations in teacher education allude to the difficulties that teachers encounter as
they navigate the multiple purposes of ELA, there is little scholarship that considers how pre-service and beginning teachers might best navigate that incoherence and unwieldiness. This study, which contextualizes and explores a pedagogical innovation in an English methods class designed to help PTs navigate the many “Englishes”, attempts to fill this gap. The findings suggest that teacher preparation in ELA would do well to conceive of pedagogical innovations in teacher education that allow teachers
to grapple with, rather than solve, the uncertainty and unfinalizability of the discipline.

The varying traditions, goals, paradigms, and discourses associated with English language arts (ELA) underscore the degree to which there is not one school subject English, but many " Englishes. " In a neoliberal context , where movements like standardization and accountability stake claims about what ELA should be and do in the world, teachers, especially beginning teachers, can struggle to navigate the tensions engendered by these many and contradictory " Englishes. " This chapter attends to this struggle and delineates a process by which English Educators might illustrate the field's vast and ever-changing terrain and support

This paper aims to draw from work in the field of English that questions the “limits of critique” (Felski, 2015) in order to consider the limits of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction. The study focuses on the relational and affective demands that resistant reading places on readers and texts. Drawing from post-critical (Felski, 2015) and surface (Best and Marcus, 2009) reading practices in the field of English, the authors perform analyses of two recent articles that illustrate critical literacy approaches to literature instruction, drawing attention to the ways the resistant reading practices outlined in each article reflect Felski’s description of critique. The authors’ readings of two frameworks of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction produce two key findings: first, in emphasizing resistant readings, critical literacy asks readers to take up a detective-like orientation to literature, treating texts as suspects; second, resistant reading practices promote a specific set of affective orientations toward a text, asking readers to cultivate skepticism and vigilance. While the authors do not dismiss the importance of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction, the study makes room for other relational and affective orientations to literature, especially those that might encourage readers to listen to – and be surprised by – a text. By describing critical literacy through the lens of Felski’s work on critique, the authors aim to open up new possibilities for surprising encounters with literature.