In this article, I discuss my multimodal dissertation to examine how four young adults remember a youth poetry slam as a site of healing, growth, and spirituality. I argue for critical spiritual literacies (Johnson, 2022) as an embodied, multimodal set of antiracist teaching practices that center the human spirit in literacy education. Data in…

In this article, co-authors Brian Mooney, Joniesha Hickson, Aaleah Oliver, and Jahvel Pierce discuss language, race, and education with author April Baker-Bell. Speaking from their perspectives as teachers, scholars, researchers, poets, spiritual leaders, and cultural workers, their experiences address the importance of sustaining a Black…

This study examined the changes in perception toward systemic racism of twenty-six first-year students at a mid-sized university in central New Jersey. All were members of the first-year choir and, with their conductor, participated in a three-week workshop called 'No Justice, No Peace.' The goal was to examine social justice issues and systemic…

How can the best of mathematical problem-based learning be applied toward literature classes? Daniel Sussman, an English teacher at Moorestown Friends School in New Jersey, discusses how he uses problem solving tactics to encourage close, critical reading of fiction texts in his Jewish literature and poetry classes. He explores the challenges of…

Quad Blogging was implemented to connect students beyond classroom walls to explore social issues. Four middle school classrooms in New Jersey, Vermont, California and Qatar served as the research sites. Students engaged in collaborative inquiry around social issues, identifying a social issue specific to their context. Final products included…

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, hip hop of the 1980s and early 1990s, and spoken word poetry have each attempted to initiate the dialogical process outlined by Paulo Freire as necessary in overturning oppression. Each art form has done this by critically engaging with the world and questioning dominant systems of power. However,…

This article explores the use of art as a form of communication and meaning-making in participatory action research (PAR). The authors, researchers and educators, contemplate this concept through a pedagogical lens, and consider the role that visual and performing arts can play in social action. Based on the work of a youth-adult participatory…

This article features personal narratives that condemn ideologies that work to render invisible the identities of translingual individuals. The author engages members of the language and literacy field, particularly teachers and researchers, in conversations that will not only denounce antiminoritized groups rhetoric but also counter prejudiced…

While much is known about the critical importance of educative experiences outside of school, little is known about the social systems, community programs, and everyday practices that can facilitate learning outside of the classroom. "Thinking Comprehensively About Education" sheds much-needed light on those systems, programs, and…

For eight years, Kathleen Monahan taught English literature and composition at Saint Peter's College satellite campus at Newark Airport. Her students were Port Authority employees--police officers, mechanics, bridge painters--trying to wedge an education into lives criss-crossed by split shifts, swing shifts, and double overtime. On the first…

When high school honors students were put off by contemporary poetry, the author engaged them by analyzing the poem as an "argument." Using the Toulmin model to establish a warrant, advance a claim, and locate details to support that claim, students were able, by treating a poem as an argument, to increase their understanding of the…

"Wish To Live: The Hip-hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader" moves beyond the traditional understanding of the four elements of hip-hop culture--rapping, breakdancing, graffiti art, and deejaying--to articulate how hip-hop feminist scholarship can inform educational practices and spark, transform, encourage, and sustain local and global youth…

In this article, the author relates how his friends do not understand the type of work that he does as a poetry teacher. His friends know him as someone who cheers on the Yankees voraciously with them and will roll his sleeves up and stuff three knockwurst sandwiches down his throat, trying to explain how Walt Whitman would approve of this, that…

The poem, "Paterson," is analyzed in the context of Paterson, New Jersey over 40 years. Changes that have taken place in the main symbolic sites of the poem are examined. In part, the poem led to changes in the area. Now the poem is a part of the city's culture. (VM)

Like today's educators, Japanese haiku poets were caught between standards (like courtly love) and everyday realities. From this tension, they created a remarkable poetic form. Three examples from teachers' professional development work apply simple-and-deep principles to listening tasks, an assessment "deal," and curricular-standards…