This article details how English classrooms might be reconceptualized as content creation sites where digital video (DV) composing enhances workshop approaches to English instruction. The author draws from a year-long study of a technology-rich twelfth-grade English classroom designed as a DV workshop at a diverse first-ring suburban school…

Textual production is a human dialogical business--an aspect of humanness and mutual connectedness--that is too easily forgotten and yet it has important implications for teaching. Using dialogue can result in learning where receptiveness and openness to new possibilities are valued above such things as task completion and the fulfilling of…

Referencing Freire, Ladson-Billings's approach to "culturally relevant pedagogies," and Moje et al.'s "third space," this memoir details an American English educator's transformation from inexperienced instructor to lifelong student.

Web-based digital video (DV) applications such as Animoto, Magistro, and Videolicious allow users without technical experience to easily create quality video by matching up appropriate images with text and sound. DV's multimedia capabilities encourage students to become more proficient in new literacies as well as new technologies. This piece…

In this article, the authors argue that the racial violence that unfolds against Black youth in various communities seeps into English language arts (ELA) classrooms. They offer a theoretical framework that centers on Black literacies that secondary ELA teachers can use to disrupt the violence and curricula and pedagogical inequities against Black…

In this article, the authors contend that high school English classes are a critical place for teaching democratic ways with words, and they call on and extend the tools of intercultural inquiry for the purposes of teaching democratic deliberation. The authors describe their collaborative engagement with an inventive data-driven genre--the…

In this series of candid reflective writings, a former high school teacher interrogates her teaching practice, students' identity development, the giftedness label, and differentiated instruction.

This article argues that the goal of an educator is to help students realize they can be effective writers by giving them the ability to demonstrate their skills. Scene writing can make writing seem less like a chore and more like an opportunity to express ideas. As students write scenes that include both dialogue and action, they gain a deeper…

In this article, a team of university-based researchers and ESL teachers describes how English learners in a high school responded to Poetry Inside Out -- a poetry -- and translation-based literacy curriculum.

This article describes the implementation of blogging in ninth-grade pre-advanced placement language arts classes to support strong writing practices. In particular, the writing workshop's elements of student choice, continuing revision, discussion of craft, publication, and process orientation meshed well with digital composition. Blogging in the…

This article examines how to use performance-related resources to teach research skills. In particular, it focuses on Shakespeare's "Othello" and argues that linking research and performance helps students put their ideas in conversation with other sources to articulate research-based arguments about a text.

In this article, the authors consider how to use poetry to develop empathy for asylum seekers among their students in Malta, where asylum seeking is a present and divisive issue.

The authors argue that to help beginning teachers improve their practice, they (as teacher educators) must acknowledge their ongoing development toward becoming professional educators in the school communities they inhabit and with the students they serve. This piece cites numerous examples of teachers reflecting over a two-year period on their…

Inspired by Leslie David Burns and Stergios G. Botzakis's efforts to demonstrate how texts recognized as exemplars by the Common Core State Standards could be used to address national standards and meet the needs of contemporary students, the author aims to illustrate how alternative nonfiction, nonprint texts--sports-based documentary…

In this article, the author explains how teachers can use Yusef Komunyakaa's "Slam, Dunk, & Hook," Frank X. Walker's "Death by Basketball," and two poems by Sherman Alexie, "Penance" and "Defending Walt Whitman," to engage students, meet standards, and develop critical perspectives. First, the article…