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Developing knowledge and practice for high-quality K-12 class discussion remains challenging, especially for new teachers juggling other classroom responsibilities. Our study reports the case of a preservice teacher learning to lead discussions while enrolled in a teacher education inquiry course, simultaneous with semester-long supervised practice teaching in a seventh-grade class (12-13-year-olds) in a high-poverty urban community. The work is guided by a complex teacher learning process for developing complex practice of facilitating discussions in culturally and linguistically diverse high school English classes. Countering popular approaches to "talk moves" as useful but often generic facilitation practices, the teacher education pedagogical innovation we describe positions teachers as knowledge-generating, agentive professionals. Our conceptual framework for teacher learning features dialogic teacher inquiry, with three domains. The first domain involves moving beyond methods texts to dialoguing analytically with and among multiple print, online, and mentor resources for supporting development of a dialogic teaching stance. The second domain intentionally guides new teachers to explore classroom data and consider students as knowledge resources in shaping instruction. The third domain sustains dialogue about discussion processes and evolving conceptions of dialogism in small groups of preservice teacher collectives, enabling sharing of inquiry data, emerging findings, and dilemmas of practice. Drawing upon a larger database, we present a case study demonstrating one preservice teacher's inquiry work with deep analysis of student talk, detailed memoing processes featuring challenges and benefits of developing dialogic teaching practices, thoughtful criticism of long-established discussion practices, and discoveries about nuances of dialogic teaching. Our case contributes to the literature by presenting an example of dialogic pedagogy for teacher education, in service of preservice teachers learning to lead classroom discussions. Additional innovative pedagogical designs are needed to assist teachers in gaining complex knowledge and practice for teaching and promoting meaningful and learning-rich talk in K-12 classrooms.

Background: Classroom discourse featuring meaning making supports students achieving discipline-specific learning. However, moving beyond recitation requires developing beliefs, skills, structures, and practices. Any theorizing we do about developing discussion practice must attend to realities of culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Purpose: Our study offers a teacher education innovation that prepares ELA candidates to facilitate discussion, framed by a set of noticing lenses: noticing for "collaborative communication," "content learning," and "equity." We asked: As they reflected on their first attempts at facilitating discussion in diverse secondary ELA classes, what did preservice teachers (PSTs) notice about their discussion practices and students' engagement and response patterns? Participants: Our study features an inquiry course in a teacher credential program. Participants were 83 PSTs pursuing secondary English credentials, student teaching in diverse classrooms. Three-fifths identified as White, with 39% identifying as PSTs of color. Design: We constructed a database of multipage essays in which PSTs reflected on videotaped discussion tryouts. We developed a coding scheme from research literature and emerging themes from data review to capture what PSTs noticed. We organized themes conceptually using and adapting a multi-lens noticing framework. Additionally, we constructed vignettes to explore ways two PSTs were noticing discussion engagements among their diverse learners. Results: We found evidence of all three noticing lenses in the data. Of the three lenses, collaborative communication was densest. PSTs were preoccupied with "getting students talking." PSTs also reflected on attempts at co-constructing meaning and tracking flow of ideas. Three-fourths documented noticing of crosscontent literacy development. Fewer PSTs demonstrated attending to collaborative interpretation of literary works, an important aspect of ELA-specific discussion. Although PSTs were beginning to leverage cultural and linguistic knowledge, many were not yet responding to or educating about racism and other forms of bias. To demonstrate multi-lens noticing in practice, we present two vignettes of how PSTs interpreted salient moments in classroom discussion. Conclusions: Our research provides a launching for understanding what PSTs notice in early stages of leading discussion and highlights what is needed to jumpstart this process early. Findings underscore the need to build authentic and tangible discussion-leading practice, with deeper attention to ELA disciplinary goals and equity. Our study highlights a framework as an analytical and pedagogical tool to help PSTs organize and reflect on emerging discussion practices. Framework and findings may serve as a heuristic for teacher educators committed to fostering learning about equitable discussion.

Promoting equitable access to the arts may depend on structures that support teachers in integrating arts into core curricula. We describe an arts-integration design that spotlights attention within and beyond one teacher credential program to one arts field--drama--engaging 24 new non-arts teachers across grades and subjects who participated in a drama academy. Our project shines the light on contributions of early-career teachers to generating conceptions derived from immersion in drama and inquiry into classroom practice. We focus on teachers' developing repertoires of drama-based pedagogy (DBP) practices for use among diverse learners, and on engagements in ongoing inquiry and reflective cycles. Drawing upon teachers' reflections and classroom inquiry projects from a multiyear experience, we mapped teachers' drama conceptions and practices in three interactive tiers: "foundational," "core," and "critical literacies." We illustrate themes with teachers' reflections and reports of practice, including a vignette of a Mexican-American/Chicana teacher with children ages 9-10, a number of them native-Spanish speaking emergent bilinguals. The study informs teacher efforts in diverse classrooms to integrate and sustain classroom drama. Drawing upon insights and themes from results, we offer policy implications and recommendations for others wishing to design for and learn from innovative drama integration efforts.

Classroom drama holds promise for student learning across disciplines. When Shakespeare's works are included in diverse classrooms, supported by drama activities, students can embody, voice, and explore themes and societal issues, bringing such themes alive. This study documents challenges and opportunities reported by teachers in their first-year teaching as they participated in an innovative cross-national partnership between Globe Education, Shakespeare's Globe, London and the School of Education, University of California, Davis. Survey results found new teachers' value exceeded their self-confidence in implementing Shakespeare and drama-based practices in their teaching. Teachers managed to infuse drama activities in classrooms, conducted inquiry into students' responses, and reported the need for further preparation to enact program practices. Two vignettes of classroom work further illustrate challenges and possibilities of partnership practices, and highlight needed adaptive work for successfully incorporating drama and Shakespeare in classrooms to explore social, cultural, and historical conflicts, themes, and dilemmas.

All disciplines have particular ways of knowing, common practices, and means of using language that mediate and potentially support engagement with the discipline. For multilingual learners, language demands of a discipline can be a closed door or a facilitated entryway. Drama and theater arts, the focus of our article, are often marginalized in curricula across the grades and therefore receive less attention to relevant disciplinary activities and language demands. In response to this pattern, our paper has several aims. We highlight ways language demands are embedded in drama and theater arts curricula and activities. Second, we describe and analyze ways instruction can attend to these demands and support multilingual learners' engagements with them. Third, we distill a set of principles that can guide teachers, guest artists, and teacher educators in their work on drama and theater arts with multilingual student populations. To accomplish these aims, we draw upon our own and others' teaching and research to frame instructional practices that support multilingual students' engagements with drama and theater activities. Engagements we describe span early childhood through high school years. Tapping our own work in several US states (Illinois, North Carolina, California), as well as in Argentina and the UK, we present data and themes from a high school study featuring drama and theater arts practices used with multilingual learners. We examine how principles from our framework are illustrated in data of the study. We also identify challenges and critical adaptations that may be needed to realize the potential of drama in work with multilingual students. Principles we identify may aid teachers, guest artists, and teacher educators in shaping drama and theater arts activities that spotlight language demands of the discipline(s) of drama and theater and provide supportive and meaningful instruction.

Drawing from theories of identity, language, and race, we conceptualize gateway moments to literate identities in high school English language arts classrooms enrolling language-minoritized youth. Gateways were interactions that afforded particular kinds of literate identities for youth. Deficit literate identities often invoked racialized language and literacy ideologies; authoritative literate identities engaged youths' full cultural and linguistic repertoires to create and critique knowledge. Occasionally, youth enacted authoritative classroom literate identities alongside or in response to dominant deficit frames of their literate abilities during planned and spontaneous classroom interaction. We note in each type of gateway opportunities for teachers to open space for youths' authoritative knowledge-producing literate identities. We aim to illustrate how a single instructional choice or classroom interaction ranges in effect from maintaining and reinforcing oppressive legacies and deficit literate identities to centering youth and their language and literacy repertoires in learning experiences for more socially just interactions and learning.

To develop preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) knowledge and practice for complex teaching, a pedagogical innovation featured a design of saturate, situate, and synthesize. Small-group inquiry into English teaching challenges was guided by a course saturated with diverse resources, situated in K-12 classrooms, and supported by visualization tools and reflection for synthesis. A case of one diverse group analyzes how they developed knowledge and practice for facilitating discussion to support critical response to text. Supported by diverse resources and synthesizing tools, discourse analysis into their culturally and linguistically diverse students’ interactions, social dynamics, and perspectives shaped PSTs’ conceptions of students co-constructing discussion.

For the last several years, teacher-researchers Jessica Jasper, Laura Dvorak, Steven Athanases, and Sergio Sanchez have partnered with a program called Globe Education, Shakespeare's Globe London. Practitioners in the program use teaching practices that engage learners with Shakespeare's works and other complex texts through drama practices. Jess and Laura, whose 7th and 8th grade classrooms are profiled in this article, are teacher affiliates of the Center for Shakespeare in Diverse Classrooms, housed at the University of California, Davis, and Steven and Sergio are the Center's research director and senior graduate research fellow, respectively. In their work, they commit to innovative uses of classroom drama to support engagement and learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students across subjects and grades. Both classrooms featured in this article are heterogeneously grouped, in highly diverse middle schools. They offer vignettes from each setting to demonstrate how access to challenging texts and an arts-oriented approach to learning are fruitful for younger learners. They partnered to develop classroom practices and to conduct inquiry on impacts and challenges of the work.

Within a partnership between a California university and Globe Education (Shakespeare's Globe, London), this study features early-career teachers working to infuse Shakespeare and drama in diverse K-12 classes. Teachers needed links between a five-day immersive London course and new jobs in diverse California schools. A three-day university Institute a year later provided a "structural bridge," featuring unit designs and drama activities for "Julius Caesar." Empathy and perspective-taking provided a "conceptual/thematic bridge," making text and activities timely for democratic, equitable societies. Adaptive teaching provided a "pedagogical bridge," guiding teachers to make partnership practices meaningful. Two first-year teacher cases illustrate challenges and possibilities.

This article reports on a case study of an English language arts (ELA) teacher education course that prioritized amplification as a method to decenter whiteness in English teacher preparation. The researchers demonstrate how they engaged in designing a course that aimed to use interactive digital technologies and multimodal texts to amplify racially and ethnically marginalized voices in ELA preservice education. Design principles that facilitated amplification included saturation of the learning environment with mediational resources and tools (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) and the notion of "low floor and wide walls" (Resnick & Silverman, 2005). The analysis revealed ways in which the course design supported engagement with culturally sustaining pedagogies and the amplification of authors, literary characters, and preservice teachers from historically marginalized groups. Concrete examples are provided of intentional design decisions and course features that opened up opportunities for preservice teachers to engage in discourse that foregrounded identities related to race, ethnicity, language, and gender/sexual orientation.

Promoting equitable access to the arts may depend on structures that support teachers in integrating arts into core curricula. We describe an arts-integration design that spotlights attention within and beyond one teacher credential program to one arts field–drama–engaging 24 new non-arts teachers across grades and subjects who participated in a drama academy. Our project shines the light on contributions of early-career teachers to generating conceptions derived from immersion in drama and inquiry into classroom practice. We focus on teachers' developing repertoires of drama-based pedagogy (DBP) practices for use among wwdiverse learners, and on engagements in ongoing inquiry and reflective cycles. Drawing upon teachers' reflections and classroom inquiry projects from a multiyear experience, we mapped teachers' drama conceptions and practices in three interactive tiers: foundational, core, and critical literacies. We illustrate themes with teachers' reflections and reports of practice, including a vignette of a Mexican-American/Chicana teacher with children ages 9–10, a number of them native-Spanish speaking emergent bilinguals. The study informs teacher efforts in diverse classrooms to integrate and sustain classroom drama. Drawing upon insights and themes from results, we offer policy implications and recommendations for others wishing to design for and learn from innovative drama integration efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors summarize their experiences of sharing drama-infused literacy activities in two middle school classrooms in California where they worked as teacher-researchers. Topics discussed include aim to innovative uses of classroom drama to support engagement; focus on value of drama-based practices for scaffolding skills of literary analysis; and role of drama to promote understanding of complex character emotions, motivations, and decision.

Within a partnership between a California university and Globe Education (Shakespeare's Globe, London), this study features early-career teachers working to infuse Shakespeare and drama in diverse K-12 classes. Teachers needed links between a five-day immersive London course and new jobs in diverse California schools. A three-day university Institute a year later provided a structural bridge, featuring unit designs and drama activities for Julius Caesar. Empathy and perspective-taking provided a conceptual/thematic bridge, making text and activities timely for democratic, equitable societies. Adaptive teaching provided a pedagogical bridge, guiding teachers to make partnership practices meaningful. Two first-year teacher cases illustrate challenges and possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a case study of an English language arts (ELA) teacher education course that prioritized amplification as a method to decenter whiteness in English teacher preparation. The researchers demonstrate how they engaged in designing a course that aimed to use interactive digital technologies and multimodal texts to amplify racially and ethnically marginalized voices in ELA preservice education. Design principles that facilitated amplification included saturation of the learning environment with mediational resources and tools (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) and the notion of "low floor and wide walls" (Resnick & Silverman, 2005). The analysis revealed ways in which the course design supported engagement with culturally sustaining pedagogies and the amplification of authors, literary characters, and preservice teachers from historically marginalized groups. Concrete examples are provided of intentional design decisions and course features that opened up opportunities for preservice teachers to engage in discourse that foregrounded identities related to race, ethnicity, language, and gender/sexual orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Classroom discourse featuring meaning making supports students achieving discipline-specific learning. However, moving beyond recitation requires developing beliefs, skills, structures, and practices. Any theorizing we do about developing discussion practice must attend to realities of culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Purpose: Our study offers a teacher education innovation that prepares ELA candidates to facilitate discussion, framed by a set of noticing lenses: noticing for collaborative communication, content learning, and equity. We asked: As they reflected on their first attempts at facilitating discussion in diverse secondary ELA classes, what did preservice teachers (PSTs) notice about their discussion practices and students' engagement and response patterns? Participants: Our study features an inquiry course in a teacher credential program. Participants were 83 PSTs pursuing secondary English credentials, student teaching in diverse classrooms. Three-fifths identified as White, with 39% identifying as PSTs of color. Design: We constructed a database of multipage essays in which PSTs reflected on videotaped discussion tryouts. We developed a coding scheme from research literature and emerging themes from data review to capture what PSTs noticed. We organized themes conceptually using and adapting a multi-lens noticing framework. Additionally, we constructed vignettes to explore ways two PSTs were noticing discussion engagements among their diverse learners. Results: We found evidence of all three noticing lenses in the data. Of the three lenses, collaborative communication was densest. PSTs were preoccupied with "getting students talking." PSTs also reflected on attempts at co-constructing meaning and tracking flow of ideas. Three-fourths documented noticing of cross-content literacy development. Fewer PSTs demonstrated attending to collaborative interpretation of literary works, an important aspect of ELA-specific discussion. Although PSTs were beginning to leverage cultural and linguistic knowledge, many were not yet responding to or educating about racism and other forms of bias. To demonstrate multi-lens noticing in practice, we present two vignettes of how PSTs interpreted salient moments in classroom discussion. Conclusions: Our research provides a launching for understanding what PSTs notice in early stages of leading discussion and highlights what is needed to jump-start this process early. Findings underscore the need to build authentic and tangible discussion-leading practice, with deeper attention to ELA disciplinary goals and equity. Our study highlights a framework as an analytical and pedagogical tool to help PSTs organize and reflect on emerging discussion practices. Framework and findings may serve as a heuristic for teacher educators committed to fostering learning about equitable discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]