The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was alarming, and compounding this traumatic shift in the world's cultural awareness of safety was the social and political unrest that unfolded during this time, which students were acutely aware of through the news and social media. After experiencing that unprecedented trauma, rich novel studies in the English…

American adolescents are experiencing an epidemic of anxiety and depression. In this article, Eric Piotrowski explores how regular writing practice and conscious conversations help students struggling with loss, grief, trauma, and myriad associated difficulties including anxiety and self-harm. Students in his classroom use fictionalized…

Through creative nonfiction, Tom Romano reveals his relationship over the past four decades with Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." He has been teaching 40 years, 17 of them in high school, 23 in college. Not a year has gone by that he did not recite to students "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." In his…

Across the country, adolescents are writing and performing spoken word poetry. In this article, the author works with members of a spoken word poetry group to develop ways to integrate spoken word into classroom and school communities.

Throughout the author's 10 years in the middle school classroom, Anne Frank remains one of the most powerful figures that her students take away from their eighth-grade year. At first glance, her students don't think they share much more than their age with the World War II heroine. They are from almost every part of the world "except" Europe;…

Jeanine M. Staples led a group of students, ages fourteen to eighteen, in developing a critical stance about words and images found in 9/11 media. Through questions, comments, and declarations toward these texts, the students labeled as "disengaged" actively participated in constructing a collaborative poem to confront repressive thinking.…