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 drama educator and a high school English language arts teacher use drama-based pedagogy to promote criticality and joy in a literature unit on Nella Larsen's "Passing."

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.

This article emphasizes the significance of fostering joy in English classrooms, arguing that it can serve as a healing, liberating force and a targeted pedagogical pursuit.

Drawing from the author's own teaching, this article explores beginning steps for incorporating video games in English classrooms and details the logistical and pedagogical challenges that occur when teachers include digital interactive texts in the curriculum.

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.

In a world marked by grief, violence, and erasure, joy becomes more than a feeling--it becomes resistance. This article amplifies the authors' personal narratives as men of color and veteran educators, illustrating how joy can serve as an act of resistance while demonstrating how teachers can use their stories to reflect, enhance literacy…

A teacher and author shares vital ways to help students counter climate despair with hope, agency, imagination, and activism.

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…

There is a growing body of research arguing that, alongside education in climate science literacy, our education systems need a deeper, broader, and more interdisciplinary education in climate literacy. Specifically, the push is to reframe climate literacy from a narrow competence taught in science classes to a broad socioscientific and cultural…

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…

To start teaching about climate change in an immediately attention-grabbing and fully somatic way, the author begins with an activity called Singer/Songbird. The goal is for students to quickly identify that media and technology influence our environmental knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors toward climate change. Besides learning that…

A teacher educator explores the way students' metaphors for literacy reveal depth and complicated emotions. Metaphor has played a major role in Jen McConnel's scholarship and teaching, both as a reflexive activity and, as her research methodology. In her most recent work, she developed a metaphor elicitation process that is, primarily, a creative…

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…