English language arts (ELA) teachers and literacy researchers are increasingly attending to the ways that digital technologies may be integrated into the curriculum. Video games, which now feature extensive narrative structures, interactive play systems, and complex multimodal semiotics, offer one avenue through which ELA teachers can expand upon the texts and literacy practices included in language arts curricula. However, professional resources and research on the use of video games in literacy classrooms remain scarce. To understand how educators have begun to integrate games into ELA curriculum and instruction, the authors conducted a state‐of‐the‐art review of the emerging literature on video games in secondary ELA classrooms. Through an inductive search and coding process, 21 studies were identified and analyzed. Two major findings emerged regarding both the specific instructional practices that instructors in the studies employed and the overall effects on students' learning described in the studies. First, the studies highlighted examples of video game instruction through the use of game analysis, game design and production, text production, and inquiry/research. Second, studies emphasized students’ expanded conceptions of literacies, development of literacy practices, growth of critical and analytical thinking skills, enhanced engagement, and increased opportunities for peer collaboration and mentoring. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for literacy instruction and research.

This review of literature highlights the efforts teacher educators and researchers have made over the past 18 years to work toward social justice in secondary English language arts (ELA) preservice teacher (PT) education. Drawing on Dantley and Green’s framework for social justice leadership, we highlight the work that teacher educators have engaged in to support secondary ELA PTs in developing (a) indignation/anger for justice through exploring beliefs about students and themselves, (b) a prophetic and historical imagination through broadening understandings about teaching and learning, and (c) accountability to students and communities through university-to-classroom transitions. We close this article by drawing on this framework to honor what we, as a field, have accomplished while acknowledging the efforts that still need to be made in working toward justice in secondary ELA PT education and, ultimately, in the schools and communities in which our PTs teach.

This article draws from an ongoing longitudinal qualitative inquiry into the preparation and development of social justice–oriented urban English teachers. It examines the cases of three graduates of an urban education–focused teacher preparation program who claim different intersectional identities and have completed their fourth year as urban educators. The article explores two research questions. First, how do these teachers understand and enact critical education practices within their curriculum and instruction, socially situated relationships, and institutional structures? Second, how do they experience and understand their sociocultural identities as contributors to their practices as critical educators and the associated outcomes? Two findings are discussed. First, the teachers felt greatest agency and success within their classrooms (in comparison to other institutional spaces) to enact social justice–oriented curricula, instruction, and other educational practices, using relationship-building with students as the foundation of their work. Second, identity constructs of gender, age, and race significantly mediated the teachers’ relationship-building efforts with colleagues and administrators, the teachers’ feelings of agency, and their activities and outcomes related to justice-oriented change at institutional levels beyond the classroom. This study contributes a rare longitudinal example of how in-service critical educators’ sociocultural identities impact their literacy pedagogies and institutional efforts to advance educational justice.