Teaching English for Joy, Justice, and Hope: Toward a Restorative English Education

• In Event: Five Years of Justice-Based English Education: A Symposium on Speculative Research, Remedy, and Repair

Abstract

Objectives:
Responding to the AERA 2025 Annual Meeting theme, this paper considers how centering joy within the secondary English methods college classroom offers students and instructors remedy from ongoing injustices fostered by the United States educational system. Recognizing the precarity of our current political moment, especially as public education faces unprecedented oversight from policies like those proposed within Project 2025, we turn to affective considerations of joy as a core principle for reparative work. Primarily, we seek to address the following questions:
What are some of the affordances and constraints of centering joy in the secondary English Language Arts (ELA) methods classroom?
How does an affectively organized university course liberate and limit speculative possibilities of a group of future educators?

Theoretical Frame:
This paper utilizes theories of culturally and historically responsive literacies (Muhammad, 2020) and how joy, as defined by Muhammad (2023), operates as a fundamental pillar toward student-centered teaching. Working alongside Muhammad’s notion of joy, we center Winn’s (2013) call for a “Restorative English Education,” a pedagogical practice as a means of radical healing (p. 127). To this end, given our own positionalities as a Black feminist scholar (Author 1) and an LGBTQ+ graduate student (Author 2), this paper considers joy through the lens of Quashie’s (2021) “black aliveness” and as a queer concept of affective incitement (Duran & Coloma, 2023). Ultimately, our work considers the power of speculative pedagogies (Garcia & Mirra, 2023) as a way of imagining justice-oriented possibilities as both researchers and teacher educators.

Methods and Data:
This paper considers data generated through a semester-long practitioner-inquiry project (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) situated in a large Midwestern university’s secondary English methods course for undergraduate and Masters students. There were eleven total students enrolled in the course. All classes were audio recorded, and every student assignment, including those formally assigned and those informally completed during class session (such as graphic organizers, shared notes, etc.), were collected for analysis. We engaged in Braun & Clarke’s (2022) “reflexive thematic analysis” (p. 4), which assisted researchers in approaching the vast corpus iteratively and with fidelity as we acted as both instructors and researchers.

Results:
Our findings encompass three distinct themes. First, “Repairing the Past,” identifies the barriers preservice educators felt within their own secondary English educational experiences. Given a majority of students were enrolled in school during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, students voiced concerns about their own futures as educators given their stilted experiences as secondary students. Our second theme, “Remedying the Present,” considers the students’ affective responses to the Methods course’s centering of culturally and historically responsive pedagogies. Finally, our third theme, “Speculating Joyful Futures,” centers students’ imaginings of their future classrooms as expressed through their final reflections and summative unit plan designs.

Significance:
Given the annual meeting’s theme, this study presents joy-centered speculative pedagogies as remedy to the much-needed, continued moratorium on damage-centered research (Tuck, 2009). Our work showcases a snapshot of how the telescopic imaginings of preservice educators may function as a means of remedy and repair in teacher education.

Authors

• Kyle P. Smith, University of Michigan

• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Michigan