A teacher and author shares vital ways to help students counter climate despair with hope, agency, imagination, and activism.

To combat the inevitable intellectual fatigue that autobiographical essay assignments often engender and, more importantly, to provide students with an authentic audience and purpose for their writing, the author designed an autobiographical assignment that liberates students from the traditional essay format while empowering them to envision…

When a student in a community-based writing program asked to write science fiction (SF), rather than a personal essay, he prompted the staff to expand the scope of the program's curriculum. This article describes how SF became another avenue for discussing community change. However, instead of just evaluating their worlds and writing about what…

Today, pedagogical stakes are high for students who experience incidents connected to their safety and privacy. Unfortunately, students live in an age when Code Red drills, or the more current Active Shooter drills, are a fact of life. In this article, the author argues that dystopian texts are not only positioned to enhance the complexity of…

Overland Park, Kansas, may seem like an unlikely setting for using the "New Yorker." While it is not the "Wizard of Oz" Kansas -- more suburban sprawl than expansive wheat fields -- the ethos is far from the cosmopolitan aesthetic of New York City. The "New Yorker" covers can raise questions that may lead to relevant…

This article explores the possibilities (and complexities) of multimodal meaning-making in the digital dimension, which allows students to compose with a variety of different modes, such as images, sound, music, and writing. This lets them think deeply about the ways in which meaning is constructed, conveyed, and eventually interpreted by an…

At a time when some high school English classrooms erase and distort experiences and identities, it is vital for educators to explore pedagogies that provide radically reimagined forms of liberatory thought. This article explores ways the work of Coates can serve as "blueprint liberation" in the English classroom. The line of broken,…

Teaching poetry offers both challenges and promises for student engagement and response. Because of the ways many students interact with poems in school settings--with an emphasis on the technical elements of poems, rather than on the emotional resonances they evoke--for many learners, poetry can often seem elusive and uncommonly difficult. This…

Picture books are often seen as a valuable tool for younger readers. In this article, the author suggests that the multiple literacies required to read a picture book can provide scaffolding and transmission of additional concepts for older readers.

Imaginations are the best tools people have to avoid future conflicts and unpopular wars. People may never find the panacea to eliminate all violence, but perhaps if students develop their imaginations today, America as a nation can begin to solve more problems with creativity than with fists. Imaginations allow for better decision-making.…

English teachers are by nature rather imaginative, a trait that is not taught in a methods class or listed as a disposition in standards for teacher preparation. Whether as part of a learning activity or a "what if" question posed in a literature discussion, imagination and creativity are integral parts of classrooms and their inclusion is as…

The author believes that imagination is alive in the high school classroom, but it is pale and sickly, suffering from a long decline in which teachers have confined it to its most decorous forms of expression--inference and interpretation--and become ambiguous about whether or not it is truly welcome. To rouse imagination in the high school…

When students take a stance on authentic social issues in their English classrooms, they have the opportunity to imagine their world as otherwise. Along with attention to other intellectual skills and civic skills, educators should prioritize the development of imagination, as it is "crucial" if students are to "project and embrace a vision for…

Many students are struggling with more depression and anxiety than ever before. These are characteristic dangers of the "consumer class"--1.7 billion people worldwide who are "characterized by diets of highly processed food, desire for bigger houses, more and bigger cars, higher levels of debt, and lifestyles devoted to the accumulation of…

In this article, the author discusses how she developed an innovative, interdisciplinary unit in eighth-grade English that links with the history teacher's Civil War studies. When constructing lesson plans, the author needed to rely on her sympathetic connection with students. To determine the best way to help students learn, the author had to ask…