A teacher and author shares vital ways to help students counter climate despair with hope, agency, imagination, and activism.

In this article, the authors share discoveries about how taking risks can expand students' and teachers' narrow experiences with academic writing. The article outlines four teaching strategies one of the authors implemented in her classroom, highlighting how these strategies fostered student and teacher flexibility, agency, and confidence in…

A writing invitation the author has found useful is to ask students to identify indelible educational moments. They all have them, some positive, some damaging. The moments don't need to have taken place in school. They could involve outdoor as well as indoor schooling: a moment when they realized betrayal for example; a moment when they knew they…

The use of popular culture to bring about an advanced learning in the students as they try to find appropriate literary allusions and further their own learning in the process is discussed.

Uses experiences with remedial readers to urge that reading must have a purpose--one purpose ultimately linked to the need for beauty, humor, and order. (MM)

Shows how to use a student-created character, Stanley Realbozo, in a highly motivating unit on character and plot development in the short story. (MM)

Argues that students must be encouraged to discover their personal reactions to literature rather than to parrot the teacher's response. (MM)