This article describes literacy practices and outdoor activities in high school English classrooms--framed as critical rambling, a pedagogy seeking to raise awareness of issues like climate justice--with illustrations from a dissertation of teacher research and additional student work.

English language arts (ELA) teachers and researchers have trialed methods for supporting youth who advocate for alternative and more just climatic futures (Beach & Smith, 2024; Datta, 2023). However, many educators are encountering legislation that muzzles critical talk in classrooms. Understanding that schools are not separate from society…

In this article, the authors work to illustrate how "Miles Morales Suspended" by Jason Reynolds, an author whose work has been targeted by book ban efforts (Knight, 2022), can be positioned in English classrooms to teach about contemporary attacks on Black literature through book bans. The teaching outlined in this article is part of a…

This article details a unit of study bringing together shared reading, place-based pedagogies, and climate-centered texts to engage students in youth participatory community action (YPAR). The authors envision an English classroom where youth read, write, and argue for change as activists as they encounter climate justice literature through YPAR…

The author pushes two desks together in the front of the class and pile supplies on them: markers, drawing paper, rulers, and pencils. As the students enter a combined English language arts (ELA) and English as a New Language (ENL) tenth-grade classroom, they select what they need and settle in to their work. As an ELA educator who is also a…

This article describes a teacher's willingness to perform an autobiographical spoken word poem in his classroom, which provided an important model for students as they composed and shared their own slam-style poems.

A teacher remembers her classroom as it used to be before the pandemic as she prepares for a new year of unknowns. Brieanne R. Lucy reflects how before COVID-19 and schools were closed, students in her English class would stand in a circle and read their first thoughts aloud. Students would showcase their command of repetition for effect, sensory…

Authentic writing allows students to write for audiences other than the teacher for reasons that matter to them and that lead to changing how an audience thinks, feels, or acts. How can teachers prioritize authentic writing instruction and help students become successful writers? Lauren Esposito does this through improv, an art form that develops…

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was alarming, and compounding this traumatic shift in the world's cultural awareness of safety was the social and political unrest that unfolded during this time, which students were acutely aware of through the news and social media. After experiencing that unprecedented trauma, rich novel studies in the English…

The author's eighth-grade ELA curriculum is rich with opportunities for students to bear witness to a variety of experiences. Besides the Holocaust unit, they read "Ghost Boys" by Jewell Parker Rhodes (2018) while exploring police brutality and segregation; "The Giver" by Lois Lowry (1993) while investigating government…

When teaching a Drama and Theater class the author's students chose August Wilson's "Fences" to focus on the teaching of "dramatic" texts. As the author reread Wilson's play, she noticed that within the first pages is the n-word, used in conversation between two African American men, two friends, and it became an immediate…

During the fall of 2019, the chaotic American political landscape was charged with scandal, debate, and accusations. As a result, students would often bring local and national politics into the authors' high school English language arts (ELA) classes. Instead of ignoring the students' heated debates in the classroom, the authors decided to embrace…

The digital is inextricably woven across people's everyday lives and literacy practices, and English educators are tasked with preparing students to be critical, ethical, and agentic inventors and consumers of digital text. What has crystallized for English educators is an awareness that facilitating "digital discourse"--or the multiple…

Many secondary English language arts (ELA) teachers are aware of the recent bills aimed at controlling which texts are available to students, how those texts are taught, and classroom discourse on issues like racism and rights for members of LGBTQIA+ communities. In the face of book bans and attempts to control classroom discourse, this article…

After ten years of public school teaching and countless student teaching observations, the author knows firsthand that English language arts (ELA) teachers are committed to teaching researched argumentative writing and, further, they often frame their assignments as questions. In this article, the author proposes that ELA teachers accelerate…