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Two teacher educators explore how youth and literary professionals engage in the creation of new literary knowledge as a form of social justice.
Following the debates over the question What is English? at the 1987 English Coalition Conference, writing scholar Peter Elbow (1990) suggested that the discipline of English was perhaps "about making knowledge rather than about studying already existing knowledge" (p. 118)-a conceptualization of the field of English not as a rarefied body of knowledge, but instead as what different communities of people do with language and other modalities of expression. This conceptualization requires English education to identify the communities-including youth communities- involved in forms of knowledge production and to describe their practice. In other words, who does English and howi Pursuing this question, we- a team of two current teacher educators and former English teachers-set out to learn from different communities and design pedagogies that draw inspiration from the most exciting and justice-driven aspects of various communities.
Across several empirical studies, we have explored the practices of both professional and youth-based literary communities. We call the people of these communities literarians-a term that is less frequently used today, but at one time was quite commonly used to described those working in the discipline of literature. For example, in a 1929 issue of English Journal Percy Boynton, writing about literature of the frontier, states, "The Turnerian thesis of the frontier, none too rapid in spreading among the historians themselves, was slower still in penetrating the thickish skins of the literarians" (p. 535). Strikingly, Boynton references "historians" and "literarians" in a way that places them on equal footing-as professionals with distinct scholarly communities. Further, Boynton points out that literarians are concerned with the textual practice of literary analysis; in the case he discusses, they debated theses describing the genre of frontier literature. Boynton implies that literarians are concerned with constructing interpretive arguments, care about issues of form and genre, and attend not only to the text itself, but also to what scholars have argued about underlying themes and forms. Boynton uses the term literarian to talk about a distinct community of scholars with a set of shared textual practices for reading, writing, and reasoning. Boyntons usage has a long history; the Oxford English Dictionary...