This manuscript explores the trends of the American Library Association's (ALA's) Rainbow Book List Top Ten Titles for Young Readers for 2023. It provides an overview of the titles and curricular connections. The authors discuss how the 2023 Rainbow Book List offers a diversity of genres and topics and also delves deeply into portrayals of queer…

After a year of teaching deaf students, Arathy Manoharan realized that she needed to be able to apply the principles of bilingual deaf education in order to be able to do justice to her profession. For this reason, at the age of 23, she moved to the United States to pursue another master's degree in deaf education from McDaniel College in…

This study analyses fifteen months of circulation data from a popular titles collection at a regional campus undergraduate library. To better understand how popular titles collections in academic libraries are used, this data analysis shows a breakdown of use amongst the entire campus population (students, faculty, and staff). Faculty are the most…

This research was a 12-week-long study of six participants attending the same alternative high school in a suburban district in the northeast of the United States. Rosenblatt's Reader Response Theory and interpretative qualitative methodology were used to examine participants' reactions to reading self-selected young adult (YA) literature during…

According to the American Library Association, book censorship is on the rise. While many censored books are adolescent novels, some titles for younger children are challenged as well. Books dealing with difficult social issues have been targets for censors historically, but recent attacks have focused on books portraying members of the lesbian,…

Young adult literature spotlights the complexity of the adolescent human condition, which helps adolescent learners better understand themselves and those around them (Wolk, 2009). Yet, teachers who are able to find a place for young adult literature in their classrooms or schools often find themselves defending their choices rather than…

This study explored the ways in which seventh and eighth grade students in three small-group book discussions used and responded to Critical Companions, texts used to supplement and support students' critical reading of young adult novels. The Critical Companions were written from the perspective of a variety of critical literary theories with the…

Teachers who are knowledgeable about the basic structure of the English language incorporate this knowledge into their instruction. In this study, the authors explored a similar relation between knowledge of print exposure and planning for a grade 5 classroom. The personal reading experience (print exposure) of 106 preservice teachers was measured…

This article explores how a reading group of pre-service teachers responded to the endings of three contemporary young adult texts and what such responses may imply about the interpretive preferences of teacher education. Set in the context of a Faculty of Education at a Canadian university, and using the lens of psychoanalytic theory, this…

Discussions of culturally relevant and "boy" literature stress the importance of offering readers occasions to see themselves in texts. However, young men of color have had few opportunities within this discourse to reveal their own experiences with literature. Rather than make presumptions about how texts serve as mirrors to them, as…

The purpose of this study is to better understand the reading patterns and preferences of rural teen readers and the cultures of reading that do or do not exist in the rural communities in which the teens reside. In addition, the researchers sought to discover, by conducting a series of focus groups, whether rural teen readers felt connected to…

The #MeToo and Time's Up movements have each cast light on the prevalence of sexual harassment in a variety of media industries. In this piece, I reflect on a college YAL seminar in which my students read Sherman Alexie's "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian." The class discussion quickly became focused on Alexie himself and…

The Royal Society Young People's Book Prize is awarded annually in the United Kingdom for the best science information book, and the winning book is chosen by panels of young people. This article discusses the findings of a study of the responses to the books and to their judging experience of young people who participated on panels in the 2011…

This piece looks at how banned books can offer an illuminating glimpse into social constructions of "healthy" and "normal" adolescent development. Unease with certain materials and topics in the secondary classroom can provide productive points of inquiry for both teachers and students.

Linked text sets (LTS) offer a promising approach to bring together adolescent students and complex texts, such as those required by the Common Core State Standards, using strategic scaffolding. LTS include a variety of print and media texts that address a guiding question that is meaningful to students such as, "Why is growing up so…