This paper defines transformative language teaching for sustainability (TLS) and shows how contemporary, learner-oriented language teaching can foster important competencies and skills needed to reach the goals of education for sustainable development (ESD). The main aim of our approach is to integrate transformation-oriented ESD into language…

Understanding subject-specific texts requires interpreting representations--words, symbols, and images--in their intended senses. Many such representations are ambiguous, with meanings that shift depending on context and disciplinary conventions. This applies not only to words, for example, 'paper' in everyday versus academic usage, but also to…

Mental health challenges are on the rise among today's youth. Recent reports have noted an acute and significant need for school-based mental health education and supportive interventions for children and adolescents. Among these approaches, a growing focus has centered on improving students' mental health literacy (MHL) as a foundational…

This article describes literacy practices and outdoor activities in high school English classrooms--framed as critical rambling, a pedagogy seeking to raise awareness of issues like climate justice--with illustrations from a dissertation of teacher research and additional student work.

In this paper, I explore the transitional spaces of teaching and writing by restorying an anomalous event in my teaching of Canadian literature in a grade seven classroom and my efforts to decolonise that teaching. Thinking with Elizabeth Ellsworth's concept of pedagogy as it relates to knowledge in the making and the learning self, I take…

This article explores the importance of incorporating diverse rural short stories into English language arts (ELA) curricula to foster empathy, understanding, and connection among students. It addresses underrepresentation and lack of variety in rural stories within publishing and traditional curricula, which affects rural students' sense of…

English language arts must be a class of both challenge and engagement. Joyful literacies can open the door to the unplanned and the new for both students and teachers as they center students' literacy experiences alongside the skills of the discipline, not just at the end of the year but, alternatively, throughout the whole school year. This…

Drawing from data generated during the 2016-2017 academic year, this study centred on U.S. children's design of two critical literacies compositions--a letter to Congress and a persuasive multimodal text. Situated within an integrated unit focused on (im)migrants, children asked legislators to act on the GOP Administration's proposed border wall…

This article explores how the Jewish tradition of l'dor va-dor (from generation to generation) is reflected in the readers/writers workshop model, highlighting the role of mentorship and introducing the 6M framework to support student-centered reading and writing instruction.

This paper revisits the well-known and often-taught novel "The Chrysalids" toward a reconsideration of the novel's place within curriculum and the pedagogies it may offer. Framed as a mourning ceremony, a way of revisioning what the novel could mean in the present by saying goodbye to what it has meant in the past, the paper progresses…

Given the importance of teaching and learning argumentation, across disciplines for participation in academic and civil discourse, this article examines how dialogic space is created and sustained in classrooms where argument is taught and learned and, when it is created, what affordances it brings to learning argumentation. Dialogic space is a…

The surge of support for the science of reading is cause for great cheer. According to the Albert Shanker Institute, 45 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws since 2019 to shift reading instruction based on what research says works. These laws often explicitly call for teaching phonics, phonemic awareness, and other skills that…

Personally and professionally, the author shares experiences with school safety and how the English Language Arts (ELA) classroom may utilize middle grade novels to address gun violence with adolescents. Highlighting five middle grade novels that address school shootings--Katherine Erskine's (2011) "Mockingbird," Emily Barth Isler's…

A high school teacher advocates for the use of the CARE method in the selection and teaching of fiction about disability in the English language arts classroom, considering the centrality, agency, and respect afforded disabled characters, as well as the expertise of the author.

Much has been written about the benefits of integrating social studies and English language arts standards. Because of the focus on reading and math as a result of accountability practices, a practical way to ensure social studies remains part of the curriculum in elementary grades is to integrate the curriculum. Historical graphic novels support…