This article describes how one department journeys from introduction to incorporation of climate fiction and an ecocritical lens in a program for grades 9-12. It explains the department's endeavors, ensuing projects, future intentions for individual and collective climate work, and ways educators can join in the movement.

This article describes literacy practices and outdoor activities in high school English classrooms--framed as critical rambling, a pedagogy seeking to raise awareness of issues like climate justice--with illustrations from a dissertation of teacher research and additional student work.

The author, forty-five years into a teaching career--seventeen as a high school English teacher, twenty-eight as a university professor--reflects on his career and his relationship with the poet John Keats that began in his second-period English class in 1967.

A teacher educator explores the way students' metaphors for literacy reveal depth and complicated emotions. Metaphor has played a major role in Jen McConnel's scholarship and teaching, both as a reflexive activity and, as her research methodology. In her most recent work, she developed a metaphor elicitation process that is, primarily, a creative…

The digital is inextricably woven across people's everyday lives and literacy practices, and English educators are tasked with preparing students to be critical, ethical, and agentic inventors and consumers of digital text. What has crystallized for English educators is an awareness that facilitating "digital discourse"--or the multiple…

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…

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…

In this article, the authors share discoveries about how taking risks can expand students' and teachers' narrow experiences with academic writing. The article outlines four teaching strategies one of the authors implemented in her classroom, highlighting how these strategies fostered student and teacher flexibility, agency, and confidence in…

The visual reality of the world is often not reflected in the classroom experiences of students, creating little opportunity for them to learn how to be critical "readers" of the visual texts that fill their lives. After participating in a provocative summer workshop on Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the…

Media literacy education provides a toolbox for helping direct students' attention to the way we shape information for audience and purpose. The National Association for Media Literacy Education defines the core skills of media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, and evaluate information, as well as the ability to create and act on…

The author describes how the production and reception of popular culture can be studied in secondary classrooms using Wendy Griswold's cultural diamond to better understand the homogenizing of content and the limiting of alternative viewpoints.

The science of artificial intelligence, or AI, is leaping ahead as more resources are focused on its promise. In this article, the authors discuss the ways in which we have explored significant, critical questions about AI in a college literature course through reading young adult (YA) novels. Although it's improving, AI or machine intelligence is…

Nearly every teacher will experience loss and grief during their years in the classroom. And yet, too often the profession assumes that English language arts (ELA) teachers must hide the emotions that accompany loss. In this article the authors share strategies for supporting English teachers in making sense of their grieving experiences and…

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…

"Transcendentalism" refers to philosophical, religious, and literary beliefs held by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, and other writers in New England during the 1830s and 1840s. Emerson believed in the significance of one's intuition and individuality. He expresses these beliefs in his…