Every year, the Rainbow Round Table Committee from the American Library Association (ALA) selects quality lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual+ (LGBTQIA+) books for the ALA's Rainbow Book List. The committee evaluated approximately 450 titles published in the United States and Canada between July 1, 2020,…

New developments in the field of youth studies are calling for a reorientation of discourses of adolescence away from developmental tropes of transition, crisis, and dysfunction, and towards a more fluid sociocultural framework. Meg Rosoff's acclaimed novel "How I Live Now" (2004) achieves a balance that transcends the pitfalls of…

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…

Incorporating children's and young adult literature in school curriculum has the ability to support academic learning across many disciplines, yet few examples exist effectively demonstrating how to integrate such literature into physical and health education classrooms. We offer several different examples of integrating children's and young adult…

This article presents the results of a study carried out to explore the elements of Young Adult Literature (YAL) present in the prescribed texts for Malaysian secondary school English as a second Language (ESL) students (3rd cycle). The three novels studied were; "Captain Nobody" by Dean Pitchford, "Sing to the Dawn" by MinFong…

This dissertation sought to explore the way preservice teachers grappled with race/ism and citizenship during a social studies methods class. Relying on the theoretical framework of racial civic literacy, this instrumental case study examines six white preservice teachers as they confront issues of race/ism in a young adult fiction novel and…

The early reception of D.B.C. Pierre's "Vernon God Little" (2003) has been characterized by comparisons with two canonical literary antecedents: J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" (1991/1951) and, at a greater remove, Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884). The three novels capitalize on the…

Sexuality is both everywhere and nowhere in children's literature since it collides with an ideology of childhood innocence that works to erase childhood sexuality altogether. Debates about identity, self-expression, the boundary between childhood and adulthood--and attempts to police that boundary--often center on sexuality. Anxiety around…

With the growth in popularity of young adult (YA) literature over the past few decades, novels such as John Knowles's 1959 classic "A Separate Peace" deserve to be analyzed for typical YA themes, such as sexuality, identity, dysfunctional family units, and coming of age motifs. This paper evaluates "A Separate Peace" from a…

The author shares three preservice teachers' linked text sets, including young adult literature and other media forms, and their critiques of the linked text sets, centering on a self-selected social justice topic: racism and the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, rape culture, and ending the stigma behind mental health. The author…

This paper examines how the rural identity of teachers shapes their teaching practices. It found that rural out-migrant teachers' re-storying of their (non)rural identity influenced their beliefs surrounding the inclusion of rural stories in their reading instruction. They faced challenges in recognizing rural stories as worthy of teaching, in…

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.…

This quantitative study investigates the diversity of the American Library Association's Michael L. Printz Award which is given for outstanding young adult literature titles. The award's website notes that it strives for diversity amongst the award winning or honored titles. This study uses quantitative analysis to determine if the committee's…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how preservice teachers conceive of and implement social actions on their college campuses related to a chosen social problem developed in a young adult novel and to examine how social action projects develop teacher candidates' critical literacies. Design/methodology/approach: This qualitative…

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…