A recent community wide reading program offers a valuable opportunity for students and teachers to respond to literature by attending community wide events, creating art, and developing relationships with community members.

This article describes the assignments the author created to engage preservice teachers in designing instructional materials that befit today's students to help them overcome hurdles sometimes present when learning classic literature. Secondary and middle school English teachers may find these assignments useful as well so their students, too,…

Media subliminally bombard people with negative portrayals and stereotypes of Black people while doing little to represent the great contributions that Blacks have made in society and literature. This trend and lack of representation are also visible in schools, in particular the English classroom. Students are not often exposed to many writers of…

Discusses research studies undertaken during the eight-year existence of the National Research Center on Literature Teaching and Learning--10 researchers worked with 50 teachers and students in a two-strand literature study, seeking to describe the processes involved when people develop their literary understandings, as well as to describe the…

Describes the Pacesetter English course and its seven units of study. Outlines the program's objectives and methods. (HB)

Describes a three-week unit with disadvantaged students in an alternative school called "Outsiders: Literature and Life," which focused on experiences of alienation, involved reading "The Outsiders" by S. E. Hinton, and culminated in the production of a magazine of student-written oral histories. (EL)