Historicizing the Role of Education Research in Reconstructing English for the Twenty‐first Century

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Notes

1. In the US, the term ‘English educator’ generally refers to university faculty (typically housed in colleges of education or departments of English) whose scholarship and/or teaching load involves working with pre‐service or practicing teachers of the English language arts in elementary, middle, or high schools.

2. These reforms are summarized on the US Department of Education’s website: http://www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml (NCLB); http://www.ed.gov/programs/readingfirst/index.html (Reading First).

3. The CEE organization is housed within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the major professional organization for teachers of the ‘English Language Arts’ within US elementary, middle, and secondary schools. While many of its members were formerly classroom teachers, a vast majority of the CEE membership are now university faculty (and doctoral students). For more on CEE’s Professional Leadership Summit, please see a special themed issue of English Education (volume 38, number 4), especially Miller and Fox (2006).

4. The original position paper was published in 2005 and titled What is English Education? (Available at http://www.ncte.org/cee/positions/whatisenglished.) My article cites The State of English Education – the article‐length version of the paper, published in 2006. I have cited the latter version because it provides page numbers, which are not available in the on‐line version.

5. For useful accounts of the mutually constitutive relationships between education and disciplines of psychology, see Danziger (1990).

6. This is obviously a self‐serving call for professional leadership and authority. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that the CEE is not operating here from a position of strength. As the authors note in the opening of the position paper, English educators generally have no more than a marginal status in US universities, and it seems as if decades of English education research, scholarship, and teacher education have had a negligible effect on curriculum and instruction, let alone policy.