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.

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…

The five young adult "Honor List" books of 2023 are all visual texts. These award-winning books offer tremendous stories in both pictures and words in the genres of realistic fiction, memoir, and historical nonfiction.

Texts that challenge the narrative status quo -- from introducing new ways of authoring to showcasing historically overlooked experiences - have garnered increasing notoriety, specifically through literary prizing. Altogether, these books not only diversified the form of the awards' histories but also the characters, content, and authors. As…

In this article, the author shows how "confinement literature" serves as a site of possibility for reimagining the role, purpose, and function of prisons in society. Confinement literature refers to any work of fiction or nonfiction that deals with the fundamental issue of human captivity. This article, like all of the authors'…

The Bechdel test, the author's student Marley explained, is named for the US graphic novelist and cartoonist Alison Bechdel. To pass the test, a work of fiction must contain at least one scene in which two or more women (preferably named characters) discuss something other than a male. Students who read from the canon of works regularly encounter…

In this article, the author describes several innovative activities for engaging students in studies of literary characters: voting on superlatives for characters, creating characters' Facebook profiles, and composing creative dialogs in which characters from different works meet each other. The author points out that it is this self-knowledge…

The authors report outcomes of a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort through a study group developed to make connections across content areas (English and history/social studies) and grade levels (middle school, high school, and college).

Due to prevailing attitudes about the prison industrial complex and African American and Latino/Latina communities, the literary production of urban street fiction has been politely disregarded by our society. Through the use of critical praxis, utilizing urban street fiction in the classroom is a necessary and urgent act of social justice. Street…

Curious about the connections between the author's students' reading tastes and those of 19th-century readers, the author read Nina Baym's excellent text "Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America" to gain a sense of how readers in the 1800s might have thought about the texts that they read. Nineteenth-century…

In teaching a research-writing unit, the author has asked her students to research and write a persuasive speech, a multigenre paper, an I-Search, a historical and comparative connection to literature, a country brochure, and a social criticism essay. While she found benefits and disadvantages in all of these assignments, the author was…

When approaches to critical inquiry and critical literacy are used by students to interrogate the dynamic between both fiction and nonfiction texts simultaneously, they shape a classroom culture of questioning that empowers students to take an informed and more activist stance about larger issues in the world. This article explores how nonfiction…

Storyboards deliver a narrative through discrete visual representations. The purpose of the storyboards was always to "scaffold" the final product and students were free to add, delete, or adapt those images that were most helpful to their project. The storyboards served as a brainstorming activity, much like a prewriting exercise for a written…

Adolescence is a period of feeling like an outsider. Teenagers are literally outsiders in their bodies because they are unable to stop or control the physical changes that are happening. Laurence Yep, whether writing historical and contemporary fiction, science fiction, or fantasy, has outsider as the dominant theme in his writing.

A review of the growth and development of science fiction literature and the ways in which it relates all cultures and reflects the comtemporary world. (RB)