On Reading “What We Know About ELA Teachers”

Word Cloud

Scherff, Lisa, and Debbie L. Hahs-Vaughn. “What We Know about English Language Arts Teachers: An Analysis of the 1999-2000 SASS and 2000-2001 TFS Databases.” English Education 40.3 (2008): 174-199. Print. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) School and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the subsequent Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS), the authors seek…
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The Discipline is Dead. Long Live the Discipline

Harvard English Department

English studies no longer exists. That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn after half a semester of PhD coursework. Too bad I’m getting a PhD in English. An English department may exist as a political or organizational unit on some campuses, but it’s unclear to me that, at the graduate or higher level, there needs to be…
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This Is the Discipline?

I find myself in this situation pretty often: with about 15 minutes left in my day, however that gets defined (often “the time I go to bed” or “the time I go home from work or teaching”), I sit down to draft a post. At the end of a typical weekday, I spend about an…
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A Crisis – One of Many?

Crisis What Crisis Art Image

During last Monday’s class, I shared that I felt I was in crisis. This is something I’ve felt since a particular professor spoke to the class. I don’t think the professor engendered the crisis, but the presentation’s unwillingness to leave the realm of theory—and my difficulty following what the professor had to say—resulted in a…
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