Critical SFL Praxis in Teacher Education: Looking Backward and Looking Forward
The six articles in this special issue examine what we define as Critical SFL Praxis (CSFLP): A social activist approach to teacher education that develops teachers’ ability to harness SFL in literacy instruction to support learners in seeing, using, and challenging the nature of text/context relationships within and outside institutions (Troyan, Harman, and Zhang, 2021). The first two articles contextualize Critical SFL historically through an interview with Australian SFL scholars and a review of CSFLP in teacher education in the United States, respectively. Two articles examine the role of CSFLP in school-university partnerships, highlighting the importance of long-term engagement with teachers in schools. Another study explores the use of SFL and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to interrogate racialized ideologies in English language arts classrooms. The final article investigates phases of learning SFL as pre-service teachers' develop knowledge about the theory and apply it in their work. Together, these articles provide further evidence of the pliability of SFL as a theory in teaching and teacher education.
Edited by
Francis John Troyan, Ruth Harman, and Xiaodong Zhang