Student enjoyment is important when creating any unit, but teachers should also consider if an activity will enhance learning. In addition to being enjoyable, drama-based activities enrich learning by disrupting passivity, encouraging participation, and enhancing comprehension. This article showcases ways to include these activities in a unit…

Faced with standardized writing tests, students must write on demand to prompts they haven't chosen. While students have little control over the prompts they must answer or the time and space limitations in which they must answer them, students and teachers have opportunities for meaningful resistance to standardized writing tests in reconsidering…

Teachers of writing strive for authenticity. When they ask students to write, they want it to be for authentic purposes. When they engage students in writing processes, they want those to be authentic processes. When they ask students to compose a particular kind of text, thye want those texts to be authentic genres reflecting authentic writing…

The author describes two students creating narrative versions of an event from Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" to portray conflicts in characters' interactions to address the issue of sex abuse. Through rewriting events in texts, students gain a sense of how use of dialogue can serve to portray larger underlying tensions between…

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…

The authors share findings from a recent study of teens who freely select to read texts typically marginalized by schools (dystopia, vampire, romance, horror, fantasy), revealing the distinct functional and psychological benefits of pleasure reading. The students who participated in the study that the authors report on were eighth graders who…

In her book "Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?" Blakely Vermeule addresses the tendency of the academic establishment to dismiss affection for literary characters in favor of objective analysis, describing teachers with "the furrowed brow, the worried expression: responsible teachers [who] wean their students off their passion for literary…

For the past 20 years, the authors have been reading and teaching literary memoir to students of all ages. In the mid-1980s, they began looking for ways to incorporate more nonfiction into their literature classes, hoping to find a fresh genre unflattened by instruction. They wanted to explore with students a genre that literary critics had not…

Preparing students for life outside the classroom is the whole point of education. The process learners use to take what they have learned in one context and apply it to another is called "knowledge transfer". To help students transfer literacy-based knowledge from high school to college, the author asks students to investigate the kinds of…

Structured opportunities for reflective writing allow students to polish their writings and to reflect actively on their written creations, while encouraging clearer and more honest writing products. In addition, the use of reflective writing can transform students as they begin to incorporate metacognition, or thinking about their thinking, into…

One of the most important aspects of developing a close, personal relationship with literary characters is "relevancy." Readers have to find something to connect with in characters to care about them, and for that connection to take place, stories and their characters have to be relevant in the eyes of an adolescent to the point where they can…

In a thematic study she calls The Hero's Journey, the author introduces the classical archetype of the hero and the journey of the hero with Homer's "The Odyssey." After all, the wily tactician dreams up the idea for the wooden horse trick, thereby winning the war for the Greeks. He visits hell and, against all odds, makes it back. He defeats the…

Using his own experiences as a reader, the author advocates for increased attention to diverse literatures. Since joining National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in 1997, the author has worked with members who include preservice, beginning, and experienced educators and scholars; they have formed committees and founded groups for…

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…

In this article, the author focuses on her experiences with genre analysis. This is not a new idea or assignment. But gearing the analysis specifically toward thinking about purpose significantly narrows the focus of a typical "here's what this genre is and who uses it" essay. Genre analysis asks students to think in-depth about one particular…