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Workshop pedagogy is a staple of writing classrooms at all levels. However, little research has explored the pedagogical moves that can address longstanding critiques of writing workshop, nor the sorts of rhetorical challenges that teachers and students in secondary classrooms can tackle through workshops. This article documents and analyzes the work that two high school educators do to organize a writing workshop around the writing and performance of spoken word poetry. Through a qualitative case study of a four-week spoken word poetry unit, we present features of the unit that both align with tenets of traditional workshop pedagogy and focus that pedagogy on the social and cultural situatedness of literacy. We show that the teachers in this case organized the classroom as a strong discursive community (Matusov, 2007) characterized by collective engagement with a genre, anticipation of a real audience, and renegotiation of classroom authority. We then analyze two discussions that arose during the unit in order to explore how students and teachers grappled with key dilemmas at the heart of writing well: how to shape one's text and message for an authentic audience, and what role(s) teachers and peers should play in students' writing. The analysis suggests that engagement with critical literacy practices like spoken word poetry can leverage writing workshop in ways that highlight the cultural and political dimensions of literacy pedagogy. We conclude by discussing how the communicative dilemmas that arose in this classroom relate to common goals of literacy curriculum, teaching, and research more broadly.

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A review of Mary Ehrenworth, Pablo Wolfe, and Marc Todd's The Civically Engaged Classroom: Reading, Writing, and Speaking for Change (Heinemann, 2021). The review focuses on the book's multifaceted rationale for engaging pressing social issues in the classroom, including how civic engagement promotes a deep engagement with key facets of literacy pedagogy. It also describes the book's numerous tangible pedagogical resources. It ends by acknowledging the sometimes contentious local context for the important work that the authors are calling for.

Purpose As concurrent enrollment (CE) programs continue to expand in the USA, a growing share of English teaching at the first-year university level is taking place in secondary schools. Though much of the discourse surrounding CE courses relates to quality control, the purpose of this paper is to argue for a reconsideration of the terms by which these courses are valued, calling for a shift from alignment to collaboration as the crucial work for participating English teachers. Design/methodology/approach This essay responds to scholarship and primary source documents related to CE programs in light of the author’s experience as liaison for a CE literature course at a Midwestern regional university in the USA. Findings An ethic of alignment pervades discourse about CE programs. The quality control promised by this “alignment story” presupposes a stable university course to be aligned with and the emulation of college faculty pedagogy as the high-priority intellectual labor. This alignment story is undermined by the variation within and between on-campus and high school iterations of the literature course. Rather than justifying an alignment ethic, this variation continually renews important questions about what constitutes college-level engagement with literature and how to best help students achieve it in a particular setting. These questions call for deliberation among a community of English teachers, not alignment of one constituency to another. Originality/value This essay builds on previous scholarship about the importance of alignment and the opportunity for collaboration in CE by exploring how an emphasis on the former misrecognizes the importance of the latter.