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…

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.

During the 2016-2017 academic year, a collaborative of university faculty and high school teachers piloted an innovative approach to professional development, focusing on secondary level literacy in a diverse suburban district. The approach included innovations in both process and content compared to professional development (PD) and instructional…

In this article, classroom researcher Harrison Campbell recounts his research into the literacy experiences of eight junior high (grades 8 and 9) students over the course of a school semester in Western Canada. Using phenomenological inquiry, Campbell invited students into a process of making meaning through experience. These experiences, brought…

The author was invited as a teaching artist into a first-grade classroom in New York City to teach a 14-session poetry residency culminating in an anthology of student writing. They began by sitting together on a carpet by the interactive whiteboard and read aloud several examples of "I wish" poems from Kenneth Koch's (1970) wonderful…

This article outlines four different views of ELA's economic mission. It also presents a classroom activity in which students (a) evaluate the four views and (b) advocate for their own ideas about ELA and economics.

This article examines the power of composing images as students construct identities and shape their own worlds. It illustrates student empowerment through agency, intellectual engagement, and community investment and suggests that composing with images forms a bridge back to alphabetic-centric composing.

This article discusses digital storytelling as a coalitional literacy practice as a venue for learners, including English learners (ELs), to learn from each other's stories rooted in social injustices.

This article examines a service-learning project held in conjunction with a reading of the nonfiction text "The Other Wes Moore." The assignment asked for high school students to provide a day of service focusing on literacy skills for an elementary school different from their own background. Service learning became a tool for…

In this article, the authors demonstrate how the reading of a novel along with culturally sustaining and responsive instruction can enhance students' sense of agency and advocacy along with their literacy development. The characters in the young adult (YA) novel "All American Boys" grapple with police brutality, as the novel's authors…

Many students are experiencing precarity in the current political climate. School walls are permeable, and even the best efforts of teachers to create safe environments where young people can learn about and express themselves cannot fully insulate the classroom from the vulnerabilities produced outside of it. These vulnerabilities may inspire, in…

Why is it important to discuss writing instruction at the global level? When a refugee student enters the English classroom, it may be helpful to know the philosophy and practice of writing instruction in other parts of the world to help better understand this new student. To better understand the views of writing instructional practices across…

Currently, more than 50 of the top 100 YouTube channels feature gameplay, a popularity largely fueled by young audiences. Let's Play videos (often known simply as LPs) typically include gameplay footage accompanied by simultaneous commentary recorded by the player. This article explores three ways English educators might use Let's Play videos and…

Within educational reform initiatives, professional development often feels like something done to, not with and for, teachers. In this article, two district literacy leaders share their experience designing a dialogic model of literacy professional development for teachers that advocates for open-door teaching. Through dialogic professional…

In this article, Michelle Ann Abate examines the typographical features of the comics and graphic novels frequently finding their way into English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms and challenges the viewpoint that they are secondary to prose-only texts, arguing instead that many comics can be seen as requiring more advanced levels of literacy…