Teacher-researcher, Katherine Macro spent six weeks observing an eleventh-grade Advanced Placement and Composition class at Sunnybrooke Central High School to examine the teacher's use of creative drama to teach Shakespeare. In this article, Macro describes ways the instructor used theater-based instructional strategies, especially a staged…

In this article, the authors share what they learned from their study of writing communities, which they refer to as writing groups, during the 2017-18 school year. The authors propose a conceptual framework for writing groups that engages students in the process of designing and participating as writers with their peers. The framework emphasizes…

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…

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…

By examining sports-related plots and motifs in the traditional study of literature, students can think deeply about the role(s) athletics should play in their education, the impact of sports on their ideas about character development, masculinity/femininity, race/ethnicity, and connections between sports and politics, economics, media, and…

Throughout this article, we explore how multiple arts-based learning strategies (ABLS) helped subvert traditional literacy methods. We ask two large questions: (1) How, as critically conscious educators, might we break down inherent institutionalized oppressive structures and have an education of liberation and freedom? (2) What can we say about…

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) concluded that "literature reading is fading as a meaningful activity, especially among younger people." How can educators continue to teach students about the power of literary response when the priority is for them to achieve proficiency on standardized tests, whose scores can only be narrowly…