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This article highlights how future English teachers both construct and reconstruct what English is and what they think it could be.
As secondary English language arts (ELA) teachers and teacher educators, we often struggle with the question What is English?- in part due to the tensions in our discipline's complex world. Our perspectives have always run the gamut of potential answers, from the practical to the theoretical-under, of course, the influences of state and national policy, professional organizations with sometimes-competing views, and any given community itself. As Bruce McComiskey (2022) reminds us,
English studies can't be boiled down to a one-word definition (grammar, writing, literature, theory, or teaching). It is the complex integration of several different disciplines that all, in their own ways, contribute to a larger project: the analysis, critique, and production of discourse in social context. (p. 1)
Depending on the educational context, the answer to the question What is English? can change dramatically, rather than having an absolute answer. In other words, we believe many answers to the question What is English? are possible and largely dependent on what our students need within the interdisciplinary, intertextual, multimodal, and multilingual world of literacies.
Unfortunately, social, political, and academic expectations do not necessarily support a more complex form of literacy in K-12 spaces. Multiple versions of ELA classes focus on teaching students a skill-and- drill form of literacy with the goal of passing one of many potential standardized tests (i.e., state tests, Advanced Placement [AP] tests, the ACT, the SAT, etc.). In oversimplifying English studies to address the skills valued by these tests, secondary English creates a narrowed view of reading and writing, divorcing texts from larger contexts and expecting students to answer overly basic questions with predetermined responses often established by a testing or textbook publishing company.
In thinking about the future of the profession and the notion of what secondary English language arts is and could be, it behooves us to look at the people who have chosen this work as their future and ask them these questions. What follows is from a cohort of then-future secondary English teachers enrolled in their first methods course in our teacher education program during the fall of 2022. As they reflected on the nuances...