Reclaiming healthcare stories can be a uniquely empowering way to teach English language arts (ELA)--especially for students of color, who are disproportionately likely to have personal or family stories of medical trauma. This article presents a way to use culturally and historically responsive literacy to empower high school students to use…

In this article, the author reflected on the challenges and opportunities that emerged as they introduced climate fiction, or cli-fi reading and writing into the curriculum, including the author's attempts to navigate the politics of the genre, activate the students' imagination and interest, and invite the students to become creators as well as…

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…

This article explores how the Jewish tradition of l'dor va-dor (from generation to generation) is reflected in the readers/writers workshop model, highlighting the role of mentorship and introducing the 6M framework to support student-centered reading and writing instruction.

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…

By centering students' experiences, youth-led participatory action research can serve as a powerful mechanism for student advocacy and social justice in English classrooms, as demonstrated by the work of Milo Palmer, a transyouth and researcher.

There is a growing body of research arguing that, alongside education in climate science literacy, our education systems need a deeper, broader, and more interdisciplinary education in climate literacy. Specifically, the push is to reframe climate literacy from a narrow competence taught in science classes to a broad socioscientific and cultural…

In this article, classroom researcher Harrison Campbell recounts his research into the literacy experiences of eight junior high (grades 8 and 9) students over the course of a school semester in Western Canada. Using phenomenological inquiry, Campbell invited students into a process of making meaning through experience. These experiences, brought…

Chosen spaces are community organizations and programs, elective classes, and/or extracurricular clubs that students choose to participate in and have the agency to refuse their membership in. The youth's chosen spaces represent an alternate possibility for what English language arts (ELA) education could look like and how it might better sustain…

A high school teacher advocates for the use of the CARE method in the selection and teaching of fiction about disability in the English language arts classroom, considering the centrality, agency, and respect afforded disabled characters, as well as the expertise of the author.

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…

Drawing from the author's own teaching, this article explores beginning steps for incorporating video games in English classrooms and details the logistical and pedagogical challenges that occur when teachers include digital interactive texts in the curriculum.

This article describes how four high school English teachers and a college professor engaged in an "instructional experiment" that focused on the verbatim docudrama "The Laramie Project." An overview of the research project is provided, along with selected moments from the experiences of the participating teachers and their…

Choosing texts for the high school classroom is a delicate undertaking. If students are to transact authentically with a text, they must believe that the effort is worthwhile. This belief is especially true when it comes to "difficult texts"-- that is, texts that, according to James S. Chisholm and Kathryn F. Whitmore, challenge students…

As an educator, according to the author, the most important objective is to know what they want students to take away with them after the unit ends, the enduring understandings that will stay with them long after they leave the classroom. The author states they wanted their students to understand that writing is a journey, one that starts with the…