Transforming English Language Arts Classrooms: A Look inside "Critical English Education: Enduring Voices, New Perspectives"
Dr. Cati de los Ríos is a Coyle Fellow with the Center for Literacy Education and professor at the University of California Berkeley. Dr. Jamila Lyiscott is a Coyle Fellow with the Center for Literacy Education and professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
At a time where the landscape of literacy instruction faces continuous political pressures and rapid technological shifts, how do educators and researchers anchor English language arts (ELA) education in culturally expansive spaces that center justice, history, critical consumption, and community? A powerful response arrives in a timely edited volume, Critical English Education: Enduring Voices, New Perspectives. Edited by Dr. Ernest Morrell (posthumously) and his advisees Nicole Mirra, Antero Garcia, Cati de los Ríos, and Jamila Lyiscott, this foundational text bridges established traditions with trailblazing, forward-looking approaches and voices. The book serves as an essential manifesto for educators seeking to expand what it means to read, write, and exist in today’s classrooms as ELA students, teachers, and researchers.
The volume is organized into thirteen groundbreaking chapters that destabilize Eurocentric norms and offer both theoretical innovations and practical and culturally affirming pathways for pedagogy.
The book opens with an introductory framing by the first three editors Ernest Morrell, Nicole Mirra, and Antero Garcia, highlighting how critical text consumption and production must evolve alongside expanding digital technologies and tools. From there, Ofelia García and Kahdeidra Monét Martin introduce Critical Race-Informed Translanguaging, while the legendary Gloria Ladson-Billings interrogates whiteness in children’s literature and young adult literature.
Sabine Little and Jennifer Rowsell advocate for Critical Multilingual Approaches to ELA, followed by Maisha T. Winn who powerfully demonstrates why understanding histories and futures matters deeply for educational equity. Centering identity, inquiry and poetics, Limarys Caraballo explores intergenerational inquiry rooted in critical hope, while editor Cati de los Ríos brings cultural art to life by demonstrating the pedagogical power of Corrido Poetics.
The text expands boundaries as Mollie Blackburn details Queering Critical Literacy, and Ruben A. González and Antero Garcia envision Abolitionist Multiliteracies. Stephanie Toliver taps into the transformative undercurrent of speculative fiction, while editor Jamila Lysicott brilliantly unpacks what Black English reveals about Black Power.
Finally, Laurence Tan, also known as “LT”, maps out the 5E’s of Rehumanizing Critical Literacy Pedagogy, culminating in a forward-looking Utopian Vision for Critical English Education by renowned scholar, Kris D. Gutiérrez.
This book provides important context for the conditions of today’s English classrooms. It elevates both senior scholars and brave new voices in the field of English language arts reflecting on forces that shape research and practice in the teaching of English within the current political and educational climate. These forces include multicultural, sociocultural, postmodern, and critical theories, as well as critical and culturally responsive pedagogies, and the discourses of multilingualism and translanguaging in ELA settings. The volume also examines the latest research and the most innovative practices in the teaching of writing, reading, and literary theory, and the uses of popular culture and other media.
