The author pushes two desks together in the front of the class and pile supplies on them: markers, drawing paper, rulers, and pencils. As the students enter a combined English language arts (ELA) and English as a New Language (ENL) tenth-grade classroom, they select what they need and settle in to their work. As an ELA educator who is also a…

Research demonstrates that intrinsic motivation "drives students' amount of reading" and that students who read for pleasure, to explore topics they care about, and for interest "read a lot and achieve greatly" (Guthrie 2). As teachers incline their pedagogy to student interests, ownership, self- efficacy, social interaction,…

This article employs the use of black textualities to reimagine an English classroom designed to cultivate critically conscious students. The author argues that a critically conscious classroom engages students in self-determination, citizenship formation, and strategic activism, and further argues that black textualities are perfect for…

Research in English education needs further exploration on the purposeful implementation of death and grief within English curriculum. In this article Lori D. Ungemah examines how, as a high school English teacher, she integrated death and grief into a unit of study with her eleventh- grade English class. She discusses how her curriculum…

Through the careful observation and analysis of a poetry unit that focuses on the work of one poet, Seamus Heaney, the authors provide mindful strategies to make familiar the processes of reading and appreciating poetry.

According to the author, prior to a move, their classroom was overflowing with stuff on the walls, on the shelves, under the tables, in the file cabinets, and in the folders upon folders in their computer drive. It wasn't just the author's physical and virtual spaces that were full; their curriculum units were packed with lessons and activities,…

In this article, the authors examine how social media memes can manipulate and polarize audiences and provide teaching approaches for student learning, understanding, and action. The authors describe the four-step instructional approach they use to guide preservice English language arts (ELA) teachers and their secondary students in recognizing…

The author was invited as a teaching artist into a first-grade classroom in New York City to teach a 14-session poetry residency culminating in an anthology of student writing. They began by sitting together on a carpet by the interactive whiteboard and read aloud several examples of "I wish" poems from Kenneth Koch's (1970) wonderful…

This article focuses on how adolescent writers took up an invitation to write and share a piece of work in school that wasn't tied to a grade. Students' responses to this invitation are examined in an effort to revise some of the typical approaches to teaching writing.

This article explores the power and potential of a role-play collaborative argument project centered on a literary work that has been banned or challenged in schools. In the project, students read a banned or challenged novel as they prepared to play the role of a community stakeholder (parent, teacher, librarian, minister, etc.) at a simulated…

If the average teenager was asked how he or she feels about reading ancient poetry, the response would probably be something akin to an eye roll or grunt of disgust. Young students generally have a visceral response to this sort of curriculum decision; it makes them shudder. One of the biggest challenges facing English teachers is to connect…

In this article, the authors (Aaron Guggenheim, a White cisgender researcher and English Language Arts (ELA) teacher, and David Glover, a mixed-race, cisgender former ELA teacher) explore how a digital writing project on podcasting enacted with eleventh and twelfth graders provided opportunities to uncover the students' hidden identities as…

On a February morning, Ms. Nelson (all names pseudonyms) was preparing her eleventh-grade class for a new unit with the goal of crafting arguments about the people and issues present in the classic novel "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe. As, teacher educators Eileen Shanahan and Min-Young Kim were observing in the classroom, it was…

Chosen spaces are community organizations and programs, elective classes, and/or extracurricular clubs that students choose to participate in and have the agency to refuse their membership in. The youth's chosen spaces represent an alternate possibility for what English language arts (ELA) education could look like and how it might better sustain…

Despite the familiar American scene of lined-up students being ushered out of school buildings while their classmates lay wounded or dead inside, and despite repeated calls for restrictions on the guns used in such shootings, nearly twenty years after Columbine, the gun lobby retains a powerful grip on the nation's politicians - using money and…