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.

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.

A teacher education professor and former secondary school instructor discusses using punk pedagogy and content in the English classroom to promote experimentation, interdisciplinarity, participation in community, and process-focused work.

A teacher remembers her classroom as it used to be before the pandemic as she prepares for a new year of unknowns. Brieanne R. Lucy reflects how before COVID-19 and schools were closed, students in her English class would stand in a circle and read their first thoughts aloud. Students would showcase their command of repetition for effect, sensory…

This vignette provides a glimpse into an approach to grammar instruction that sought to value students' voices and linguistic knowledge, position language as flexible and socially situated, and encourage dialogic interactions with language. This approach--a linguistically responsive approach--ultimately sought to disrupt hierarchies typically…

This article contends that if English language arts (ELA) teachers support students' ability to notice and name what influences their reading response, students can then return to texts in ways that allow them to understand the content differently as they are more mindful of how experiences shape meaning making. Slowing down, then, may lead to new…

The author's eighth-grade ELA curriculum is rich with opportunities for students to bear witness to a variety of experiences. Besides the Holocaust unit, they read "Ghost Boys" by Jewell Parker Rhodes (2018) while exploring police brutality and segregation; "The Giver" by Lois Lowry (1993) while investigating government…

When teaching a Drama and Theater class the author's students chose August Wilson's "Fences" to focus on the teaching of "dramatic" texts. As the author reread Wilson's play, she noticed that within the first pages is the n-word, used in conversation between two African American men, two friends, and it became an immediate…

During the fall of 2019, the chaotic American political landscape was charged with scandal, debate, and accusations. As a result, students would often bring local and national politics into the authors' high school English language arts (ELA) classes. Instead of ignoring the students' heated debates in the classroom, the authors decided to embrace…

Two teacher educators offer several activities for youth to examine representations of adolescence by writing poetry, studying social media, and analyzing young adult literature through a youth lens.

The digital is inextricably woven across people's everyday lives and literacy practices, and English educators are tasked with preparing students to be critical, ethical, and agentic inventors and consumers of digital text. What has crystallized for English educators is an awareness that facilitating "digital discourse"--or the multiple…

A sense of homeplace has always carried a "radical political dimension," as "one's homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist" the greater society's efforts to Other and alienate. Such homeplaces, however tenuous and fragile, have often been created and kept by…

After ten years of public school teaching and countless student teaching observations, the author knows firsthand that English language arts (ELA) teachers are committed to teaching researched argumentative writing and, further, they often frame their assignments as questions. In this article, the author proposes that ELA teachers accelerate…

After watching his fifth-grade son perform in "The Taming of the Shrew," Ben Lathrop realized that having learned the play through performance, his son found the experience enjoyable. Moreover, his acting decisions (movements, gestures, vocal inflections) demonstrated that he had at least some understanding of his lines, suggesting that…

The author asks, "Where can we, as English language arts teachers, create room in our classrooms for curiosity--for students and for ourselves?" She outlines ways to use Genius Hour to help create an equitable, level classroom with access and ownership for all.