Purpose This paper aims to introduce speculative testimonios as a pedagogical approach for engaging teacher candidates with social justice actions through speculative young adult literature, specifically examining how imaginative narratives can create brave spaces for critical dialogue about contentious sociopolitical realities. Design/methodology/approach This conceptual paper premieres a four-phase framework for implementing speculative testimonios in teacher education, drawing on critical literacy theory, testimonio as pedagogy and speculative fiction. The approach is illustrated through analysis of Donna Barba Higuera's The Last Cuentista (2021) as an exemplar text. Findings Speculative testimonios offer a mediated dialogue space where teacher candidates can explore difficult sociopolitical realities through the protective lens of imagined narratives. The framework centers the agentic and action-oriented features of testimonios with speculative fiction's imaginative possibilities via critical pedagogy situated in restrictive educational climates. Originality/value This paper contributes the first systematic framework for speculative testimonios in teacher education, addressing the urgent need for pedagogical approaches that navigate increasing restrictions on classroom discourse while maintaining commitments to social justice and critical consciousness.
Purpose-This narrative aims to examine what writing feedback has come to mean in a multilingual provincial university classroom where students increasingly revise between teacher guidance and AI-generated suggestions. Design/methodology/approach-Grounded in classroom experience across Advanced Grammar in English, History of the English Language and Language and Journalism, courses in a university in the Philippines with a number of Indigenous students, the paper reflects on how students negotiate feedback in contexts shaped by language diversity, institutional expectations and emerging AI use. Findings-Students value teacher feedback for clarity, explanation, personalization and support for deeper revision, while AI feedback is appreciated for speed, accessibility and help with surface-level concerns. Research limitations/implications-As a teacher narrative rooted in one context, the paper offers situated insight rather than broad generalization. It points to the need for further classroom-based work on feedback, AI-assisted revision and multilingual writing. Practical implications-English teachers need to help students distinguish between surface correction and deeper revision, and to use AI critically rather than unreflectively. Social implications-Feedback shapes not only writing quality but also students' sense of legitimacy, voice and belonging, especially in multilingual and Indigenous-facing classrooms. Originality/value-The paper shows that AI has not displaced teacher feedback but clarified its interpretive, relational and ethical value in English teaching.
Purpose-As digital media reshapes storytelling, pedagogical opportunities emerge for empathic engagement through videogames. The term ludonarrative highlights videogames that evocatively intertwine story and gameplay. As videogame use both inside and outside of school increases, so does young people's potential for empathic experiences with playing ludonarratives. This paper aims to conceptually explore such possibilities. Design/methodology/approach-The term ludonarrative empathy is introduced, which expresses how story and gameplay work together, stemming from sociocultural, postdigital and pedagogical theories. A novel analytical tool, Ludonarrative Empathy Analytical Framework (LEAF), is outlined for analyzing how videogames can be used in teaching and learning that engages empathy and then applied to three commercial videogames. Findings-The analysis of the three videogames using LEAF reveals how gameplay and narrative elements of videogames offer playful and meaningful experiences for student empathy. This is typified through games' ability to mediate player agency in addition to multimodal and semiotic means of communication. Originality/value-While empathy through literature has been widely studied, less is known about the effect of videogames on empathic engagement within classroom contexts. There is a gap in this field of understanding their potential affordances for experiencing empathy through textual study in the subject of English; this paper therefore invites further empirical research.
Purpose The field of English education is in need of teacher education contexts that bridge the theory-practice divide of using games to meet literacy instructional goals. The purpose of this paper is to see what pre-service teachers learn from playing games alongside youth. Design/methodology/approach Drawing from theorizations of multiliteracies pedagogies and teacher agency, this social design experiment examines what three pre-service teachers (PSTs) learned from engaging in a weekly in-person program that brought together youth and teachers to participate in table-top roleplaying games (TTRPGs). PSTs participated in roleplaying games, collected and analyzed feedback from youth participants and designed and implemented TTRPGs for the youth. Coding pre- and post-interviews and triangulating with teaching artifacts, post-session reflections and field notes of the sessions, the authors traced agentic shifts in PSTs’ understanding of games for learning, conceptions of curriculum and instruction and classroom structures for conflict resolution. Findings The authors found that PSTs helped youth navigate across personal and literacy learning goals, learning to provide customized differentiation for youth and to support productive conflicts instead of conflict avoidance. PSTs also noticed benefits of disrupting normative social structures through gameplay. Originality/value Answering questions in the field around how teachers can effectively learn to use games in agentic and equitable ways, the authors suggest that playing games alongside youth and focusing on youth’s goals for learning helped PSTs to notice and support more disruptive uses of play and engage more expansive and social justice-aligned conceptions of game-based learning.
Purpose - A traditional English Language Arts classroom is a community of practice, but it is one that often excludes students - and teachers - who do not belong to the dominant cultures that created those classrooms. As a result, students can miss out on the challenges and pleasures of joining a community in textual exploration. Many educators are imagining alternative ELA communities of practice. In this essay, we aim to offer a framework and a detailed example for doing so. Design/methodology/approach - The authors focus on four elements of a community of practice: purposes, principles, practices and people. The authors then draw from Tawheedah's experience in her HBCU college band - a community of practice dedicated to sustaining Black American culture-and map those elements from HBCU band to ELA classroom. Findings - The authors designed a performance-based course built on performance, interdependence, student creativity, culturally sustaining language arts and the principles of "jammin no shammin." Like HBCU band, the authors' ELA class focuses on canonical texts and pop favorites, and students lead along with teachers to explore and perform those texts to audiences. Research limitations/implications - No community of practice is perfect. Some aspects of communities of practice do not map well onto creative, culturally sustaining, inclusive classrooms. Practical implications - Still, the authors hope educators engage in this exercise in imagining alternatives to the traditional classroom. Social implications Such imagining is a step toward redesigning a classroom for all students and teachers, but especially for students who may experience cultural dissonance as they engage in the historically entrenched traditions of English Language Arts. Originality/value - This essay offers a practical framework for speculative dreaming.
