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

It's vitally important for English teachers to engage their students in critical media literacy (CML), a theoretical and practical approach to media that encourages and empowers students to read and create media texts critically, with an eye toward power relations. In this article, the authors share a two-week unit related to climate change that…

Students' attitudes are shaped by what they read. Their perspective determines what each reader chooses to focus on and be aware of while reading. If there is a lack of guided reading or prior experience with a particular topic - such as disability - students may not be aware of its presence in a text, and they may not recognize negative character…

Trust is a central component of caring, reciprocal relationships among teachers and students. It goes beyond teachers caring solely about students' academic achievement and includes caring about what matters deeply to students, their families, and their communities. To examine the importance of teachers creating trusting relations with their…

To start teaching about climate change in an immediately attention-grabbing and fully somatic way, the author begins with an activity called Singer/Songbird. The goal is for students to quickly identify that media and technology influence our environmental knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors toward climate change. Besides learning that…

Having students read news articles or novels, watch television snippets, engage in class discussions, essay-writing, emailing, and drafting letters are excellent ways to broach any number of society's systemic and oppressive social maladies. Engaging in these activities in the English language arts classroom can serve as a catalyst to encourage…

When schools in Arkansas and most of the country shut their physical doors and moved to remote instruction in March 2020, Rachel Evans, Christian Goering, and Seth French planned to engage in a multifaceted experience that bridged personal narrative writing, songwriting, and podcasting. Undaunted by the shutdown, they offered Evans' ninth-grade…

In this article, the authors explore multimodal literacies and how they use literacy contracts and quadrants to help students to examine their identities via writing and the creative arts. A notable outcome of their joint efforts is that when teachers and students transacted with multimodal literacies, they showed value for their personal and…

Although plagiarism is not new, the rate and frequency of plagiarism has steadily (and somewhat alarmingly) risen in the past twenty years, coinciding with the ease of access to the Internet. The current generation of students - Gen Z, they've been labeled - is growing up in a world of sharing, a world where, with a quick tap of a button,…

In this article, the authors (Aaron Guggenheim, a White cisgender researcher and English Language Arts (ELA) teacher, and David Glover, a mixed-race, cisgender former ELA teacher) explore how a digital writing project on podcasting enacted with eleventh and twelfth graders provided opportunities to uncover the students' hidden identities as…

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…

According to the author, prior to a move, their classroom was overflowing with stuff on the walls, on the shelves, under the tables, in the file cabinets, and in the folders upon folders in their computer drive. It wasn't just the author's physical and virtual spaces that were full; their curriculum units were packed with lessons and activities,…

One of the first plays that the author assigned in his Spring 2017 Shakespeare for the 21st Century class was "Julius Caesar." In conjunction with the play, he handed out an article written by political commentator Andrew McGill that explained the decision by West Virginian coal miners, a demographic that had historically voted blue in…

Dynamic and responsive methods enable teachers to assess students' writing skills precisely and equitably, and to empower students of diverse skill levels to develop their writing. Assessing writing with equity-minded precision requires paying close attention to students' performances as writers, identifying challenges in those performances, and…

This piece explores historic trends in the standardization of English education. Beginning with the advent of NCTE in 1912 and continuing through the subsequent century, the article traces how "English Journal" has documented educators' approaches and attitudes concerning standardization.