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…

Scholars in recent years have explored the connections between video games, literacy, and learning. Research illustrates that video games can serve as texts for engagement and analysis in English language arts classrooms. Scholars have also demonstrated how games themselves effectively integrate a complex array of learning principles that help…

There has been a noticeable shift in how young readers approach reading where digital literacy communities serve as much purpose as traditional literacy communities like an ELA classroom. This article offers an introduction to TikTok and BookTok as well as several methods of integrating TikTok into classrooms. As the sub-community for book lovers…

Engaging students in the reading process is challenging when they are unable to connect to texts. It is important to provide inclusive and diverse texts (IDTs) in the language arts curriculum. To promote a positive reading experience, all students need to read IDTs with non-stereotypical depictions of girls, women, people of Color, and more. This…

The author describes a literacy activity that took place in an 11th-grade English language arts classroom: student-created role-play. Through a discussion of two such role-plays, the author explores how these performances illustrate students' engagement with raciolinguistic ideologies that marginalize certain speakers through the simultaneous…

Abstract The authors illustrate how literacy and language arts teachers work with students to help them act and engage as agents in and beyond school. The authors demonstrate how teachers design environments for learning and practice and how young people use resulting skills and motivations intentionally as a result of their experiences in those…

Discipline-specific literacy instruction is key to supporting adolescents' overall literacy development. Job-embedded professional development that supports teachers' discipline-specific literacy instruction via instructional coaching is a promising approach to enacting disciplinary literacy instruction in English language arts (ELA) classrooms.…

Online synchronous collaborative writing (SCW) is ubiquitous among youths and has found its way into many secondary English language arts classrooms. Yet, to maximize the affordances of online SCW, teachers need a synthesis of contemporary, evidence-based practices for how to support students during this form of writing. The purpose of this…

Young adult literature that features respectful representations of fictional characters with reading difficulties can play a role in building classroom communities and helping readers understand more about themselves and their worlds. Furthermore, language arts teachers and special education teachers can use texts that feature positive portrayals…

English language arts teachers and other literacy educators have the opportunity to create more positive and more inclusive school experiences for gender- and sexual-minority students, but many hesitate to transform their curricula and practices because of fear of community protest. To support educators who feel vulnerable or constrained, this…

As teachers, it is important that we grapple with the reality that schools, teachers, and the larger social institutions that impact us are never neutral. Scholars explain that the starting place for teachers who want to enact practices for social justice and to disrupt harmful "single stories" is to read LGBTQ titles and consider how…

Adult men create zines (self-publications written as alternative to commercial magazines) that advance content learning and knowledge. We describe three of these zine writers who created five zines on topics related to the disciplines of science, social studies, and English/language arts. We collected their zines, interviewed the authors, and…

This article argues that every teacher is not a teacher of literacy, but instead posits that teachers in content areas must adapt literacy strategies to the content being taught and to the context in which that teaching occurs. Examples of adaptations of a literacy strategy for use in English/language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies…

At the university level, rhetoric dominates conversations surrounding writing pedagogy, yet preservice English language arts teachers are not typically instructed to teach rhetorically. Although the stated exigence of the Common Core State Standards is to prepare students to be college and career ready, this analysis suggests misalignment. This…

Tour Across America is an interdisciplinary, project-based, multimodal (IPM) activity where students get the opportunity to apply what they learn to a real-life situation while illustrating the interdisciplinary nature of literacy. It provides students with a high-interest, creative platform to review, reinforce, and integrate learned literacy…