Today, as a teacher, educator, and researcher, the call for diverse and inclusive books, especially those with thoughtful, intelligent, and genuine representations of disability, is even more important to me. Readers must engage in conversations around depictions of disability, challenging stereotypes or misunderstandings they have about people…

Students' attitudes are shaped by what they read. Their perspective determines what each reader chooses to focus on and be aware of while reading. If there is a lack of guided reading or prior experience with a particular topic - such as disability - students may not be aware of its presence in a text, and they may not recognize negative character…

In this article, the author reflects on Frantz Fanon's "historico-racial schema" regarding the Black body and shares a personal teaching journey in English education from China to the United States. The author further builds upon Kevin Leander and Gail Boldt's critique of "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" to examine the dimension…

Located in the suburbs of a large midwestern city, Trail Middle School serves a predominantly middle-class population. The data the authors feature in this article include group discussions and interviews with students, as well as recordings of in-class lessons, student work, and fieldnotes. The authors focus on the theme of gender as it emerged…

In this article, the authors describe how self-directed learning allows students to design their own research projects and rubrics, differentiated for their cognitive readiness, learning preferences, interests, and affect. The authors found that students viewed their self-directed learning as challenging but fun because it is relevant and doable,…

This article highlights how considering questions of cultural positionality, especially from the perspectives of career teachers, can help support communities of teachers still in the developmental stages of their practice. In doing so, the authors: (1) challenge preexisting stereotypes of "master" and "novice" teachers; (2)…

The United States is an increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse nation. English teachers play an important role in prompting students to engage in democratic dialogue about equity in response to visual messages that circulate historic and present- day racism and other derogatory messages about class, gender, sexual orientation, and…

An incident of bullying via Twitter in a Midwestern US high school problematizes traditional stereotypes about adolescents and social media, as witnessed by two English teachers at the school who write about their own experiences and implications for English curriculum and instruction.

This article describes a class in which media literacy was used as a means for student inquiry into cultural constructedness of adolescents. Students read and critiqued media portrayals of teenagers, then used digital video to re-construct their own complex re-presentations of their adolescent selves.

While equity of opportunity is increasing in the enrollment of students in advanced classes, an equity of outcome is not shown in the exam results (College Board). There are distinct difficulties that lie in the paths of traditionally underrepresented students; for them, the long hallway, essentially all advanced courses where minority students…

As a teacher-researcher concerned with the educational approaches and learning outcomes of urban students, the author believes it is important to explore hip-hop as a curricular and academic resource because hip-hop represents the ways in which urban youth speak, think, create, move, and relate to the world. This article explores the English…

The author critiques covers of "Ebony" and "GQ" magazines in order to expose race and class narratives, and he encourages teachers to help students to become more aware of the ways in which other images "connote cultural information." Because of the prevalence of images in contemporary society, it is imperative that…

Films portraying characters with disabilities are often shown in the English classroom. Films such as "Of Mice and Men," "Simon Birch," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "The Glass Menagerie," "Moby Dick," "Gattaca," and "A Beautiful Mind" often show simplistic and stereotypical representations of characters and their…

In this article, the authors share five practical teaching activities for introducing disability into the secondary English curriculum that also address NCTE/IRA objectives for the English language arts. They have used these lessons to help students better analyze the language/rhetoric of disability, understand how disability is represented in…

When Don Imus made his infamous comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team in 2007, he provoked widespread (yet short-lived) attention to the circulation of language practices demeaning to women of color. In an elective autobiographical writing course that the author designed with and for urban high school girls, the students…