This article describes a community action student- led project that features authentic writing and engagement to increase motivation. The article highlights important instructional strategies for implementing community action projects and the resulting student learning. The article concludes with the authors' reflections and observations.

In this article, the authors share what they learned from their study of writing communities, which they refer to as writing groups, during the 2017-18 school year. The authors propose a conceptual framework for writing groups that engages students in the process of designing and participating as writers with their peers. The framework emphasizes…

"Transcendentalism" refers to philosophical, religious, and literary beliefs held by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, and other writers in New England during the 1830s and 1840s. Emerson believed in the significance of one's intuition and individuality. He expresses these beliefs in his…

The feeling of voicelessness creates a sense of internalized powerlessness for students in their schooling and preparation for learning and success. The San Joaquin Valley is surrounded by farms as well as correctional institutions and service industries. Each of these industries is interconnected with students' lives, with some having family…

The author details the pedagogy that empowered his high school students to use poetry as a part of a theatrical inquiry into race and whiteness. Using elements of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in concert with playbuilding, The Whiteness Project was the author's attempt as a high school English and Drama teacher to build a…

In the urban high school where the author was teaching, grade 11 AP Literature classes were studying Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" through literature circles. She had noticed that students undertook the role of Illustrator with immense effort, purpose, and creativity. Moreover, the group discussions surrounding the Illustrator's visual…

This article describes how adolescent students learn to question their lives and contexts through the "Crossing Boundaries" podcast assignment. In the assignment, the students pick a topic, design a project, interview at least one other individual, and analyze their data. The students do not realize they are engaging in original…

The authors explore strength-based learning projects that value the lived realities and literacies of adolescent scholars of color, setting the stage for the powerful relationships through which meaningful learning happens.

This article describes a class in which media literacy was used as a means for student inquiry into cultural constructedness of adolescents. Students read and critiqued media portrayals of teenagers, then used digital video to re-construct their own complex re-presentations of their adolescent selves.

According to the author, as our abilities to combine image and text become more sophisticated and ubiquitous, digital storytelling is a powerful means for sharing those stories. Digital storytelling is a perfect way to remix stories. To present American literature as relevant to students' lives, the author rewrote their curriculum using backwards…

Teaching poetry offers both challenges and promises for student engagement and response. Because of the ways many students interact with poems in school settings--with an emphasis on the technical elements of poems, rather than on the emotional resonances they evoke--for many learners, poetry can often seem elusive and uncommonly difficult. This…

Writing centers on college campuses are spaces where students work with tutors individually or in small groups to build the skills to produce better essays, term papers, and other writing assignments. This article describes how high school students can themselves play a role in answering the "yeahbuts" and help create writing centers in…

Project "Green Footprint" is a local community environment project created by fifth-grade students to remind the citizens of their school (and Earth) to tread lightly on Mother Nature's creations. The students chose to focus on the air quality outside the school, specifically the carbon emissions produced by idling cars. Students complete Internet…

This article discusses how to make the classics matter to students through digital literacies and essential questions. The authors share their experiences with planning and delivering a unit that ultimately gave "The Scarlet Letter" real meaning for their students--and helped them do the same for other classics they taught. Students read "The…

Student motivation is difficult to measure, manage, initiate, and control. Teachers control many aspects of classroom environments, including student interaction and cooperation, by the rules and procedures they establish and maintain. But, there is often little classroom teachers can do to predict what will motivate students to move beyond the…