Scholars from various disciplines have theorized a relationship between reading fiction and empathy. Research in cognitive studies suggests that understanding fiction requires Theory of Mind, or the cognitive ability to understand the feelings and motivations of others. Some studies build on this research to suggest reading fiction helps to…

School-based supports, such as LGBTQ+ -themed curriculum, invite opportunities for challenging oppression with respect to gender and its intersections with other identities such as sexuality and race. However, more understanding is needed regarding how literacy educators might leverage these opportunities. This article describes how intimacy,…

Purpose: Recognizing that hate crimes and antisemitic attacks are increasing, the purpose of this article is to discuss ways "The Assignment" by Liza Wiemer, a contemporary young adult novel that depicts curriculum violence and its effects on students, acts as a "disruptor" in young adult literature. The authors present a…

This case study utilized poetic inquiry, a qualitative research methodology, to explore the reading experiences of 13 postgraduate high school students from various North Texas high schools. After selecting and reading young adult novels featuring protagonists who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex,…

The purpose of this study was to gauge the effects of offering LGBTQIA+ novels to students in an English Language Arts and Reading high school setting. Most novel options for students come from old books available in the school's book closet consisting of antiquated stories offering little in the way of diversity. Students are more likely to be…

Part of a larger yearlong ethnography at a comprehensive, public high school in a Midwestern city in the United States, this article explores a telling case from a bookclub that was part of the school's Genders and Sexualities Alliance. Approaching curriculum as a question of what knowledges are valued in education, in this article I describe the…

As Catholic schools serve an increasingly racially diverse population of students, they must grapple with the critical requirement to address these students' unique needs while heeding the call from modern Catholic Church leaders to engage in explicit antiracist action. Using the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework (HRL), this article…

In this manuscript, the authors examine three young adult novels using critical literacy as a lens for addressing issues of power and justice around sexual violence and the actions taken by characters to make social change in their fictional schooling contexts. This piece uses scholarship around youth activism in young adult literature to engage…

Singular efforts in PK-12 settings to instill a social justice mindset will not achieve the same outcomes as social justice education infused throughout content area instruction. In collaboration with 10th-grade teachers, we developed and implemented a biblioguidance curriculum to develop students' social justice and content area competency.…

If Young Adult (YA) literature constitutes one of the social mechanisms that indoctrinate teenagers into working within capitalistic institutions, high school teachers would do well to ask what political and economic ideologies YA fiction invites teenage readers to adopt. This article examines one genre of YA literature--YA dystopian fiction--to…

Audiobooks have been growing in popularity over the last decade. Although researchers have increasingly recognised the value of audiobooks as rich multimodal texts that support literacy engagement in classrooms, there have been few detailed pictures of classroom practice related to audiobooks. In this practitioner narrative, a secondary English…

Boaler (2016) asserted that problem posing is the "essence of real mathematics", yet many students do not have opportunities to pose and then solve their own mathematical questions. Rather, students spend their time solving tasks someone else posed--often their teacher or textbook. To promote problem posing, the author designed,…

Social emotional learning (SEL) is an important field of education, and has been for the past 25 years, although the majority of SEL programs are designed for elementary ages, some for middle school, and only a few designated for high school ages. With a weakening of community organizations, an increase in stressors, and higher occurrences of…

The problem addressed in this quantitative ex-post facto study was that African American, Latino, and Native American students have lower reading fluency than Caucasian counterparts. The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent incorporating more literature written by African American, Latino, and Native American authors had on the…

This qualitative study implemented a Critical Discourse Analysis using the "PRDE English Program Gender Equity Manual" (2015). In addition, this study compared the narrative literature from PRDE's English 9th textbook--"Inside: Language, Literacy and Content by National Geographic and Cengage Learning" (2014) (NG Texts) , and…