For many secondary-level teachers working with adolescent language learners, one of the motivations for choosing English teaching as a profession is a shared love of reading short stories. At its best, entering a narrative is a sensory experience: engaged readers see, hear, and feel the words of a story and imagine themselves within its pages.…

This article urges educators to responsibly teach, discuss, and read against "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee for fear that it may otherwise perpetuate subtle racist ideologies in generations of students who continue to read it in schools. One way to do this is through a comparative lens of old and new racism.

Rooted in examples from their own and others' classrooms, the authors offer discipline-specific practices for implementing antiracist literature instruction in White-dominant schools. Each chapter explores a key dimension of antiracist literature teaching and learning, including designing literature-based units that emphasize racial literacy,…

The implementation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) across the country necessitates revising the English curriculum, asking teachers to incorporate and analyze more perspectives in the classroom as society becomes more diverse. The authors wondered if this reform might provide an opportunity to examine social equity by studying an anchor…

Curious about the connections between the author's students' reading tastes and those of 19th-century readers, the author read Nina Baym's excellent text "Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America" to gain a sense of how readers in the 1800s might have thought about the texts that they read. Nineteenth-century…

How can teachers help their students to meet high standards of reading and writing while also preparing them to become thoughtful and productive members of a multicultural society? And why is it important to do this? In her new book, Mary Dilg brings us into her high school English classroom, where we see students reach across the social,…

Providing a gateway into the real literature emerging from the Middle East, this book shows teachers how to make the topic authentic, powerful, and relevant. "Teaching the Literature of Today's Middle East": (1) Introduces teachers to this literature and how to teach it; (2) Brings to the reader a tremendous diversity of teachable texts…

Author Sue Monk Kidd, who is white, employs stereotypes of African Americans and problematically appropriates features of black writing in her novel "The Secret Life of Bees." Nevertheless, this book is worth teaching, not only because it has acquired much cultural capital but also because it offers students a way to examine relationships between…

High school teacher J. Arias employs a research method from anthropology to motivate students to research and write. Learning to use the methods and perspectives of ethnography, students become critical viewers and thinkers, able to connect the themes of literary works to their lives and to critique the variety of texts that surround them. Arias…

This textbook is a sixth reader. Selections are taken from English and American literature, and when possible, conform to the original works. Many selections have elocutionary value. In making up the Selections for Reading, great care and deliberation have been exercised. Upwards of one hundred leading authors are represented, and thus a wide…

Compares and contrasts two adolescent novels, S. E. Hinton's "The Outsiders," and B. Ellis' recent "Less than Zero." Argues for the social relevance and educational worth of both novels, showing that they raise moral and social issues teens need to think about and are already confronting. (JG)

Provides a list of 118 reasons why the author's students claim they study American literature, including: (1) to broaden their vocabulary, (2) to learn from other people's experiences, and (3) to develop an open mind about different kinds of literature. (JD)

Explains an approach to teaching American literature that begins by using regional materials to interest students in reading and then expands to include classical works. (EL)

The novels of Robert Lipsyte are excellent for use in a middle school or secondary school classroom. His 1967 classic, "The Contender," and its sequel, "The Brave," are both strong on characterization, plot, and theme. Focusing on "The Contender," students can explore contending characters, forces, and themes. Related…

This book questions the educational suitability of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in the classroom. The author argues that the book teaches misguided lessons about race relations. "Huck Finn's 'Hidden' Lessons" challenges the more typical understanding of Huck Finn and guides readers through an analysis that demonstrates how racism functions…