Purpose: This paper aims to explore how teachers' choice of text, centering of student voices and collaboration with the community around a language arts curriculum impacted the engagement and learning experiences of 85 11th and 12th-grade refugee background students designated as English language learners. Design/methodology/approach: A…

Over the years that I have taken secondary school students to the theatre, the the digital revolution has moved through schools, classrooms, and even theatres, calling into question my goal of contributing positively to students' identity formation through exposure to live plays. Responding to calls to examine the ways in which young people's…

During a series of high school English and Drama class trips to the theatre, so many students were online, the entire back row often glowed blue. Although much of the literature suggests that information and communication technologies are benign and neutral, this back-row collision of digital and live culture signals to teachers that technology is…

It is imperative that in conversations about literacy instruction teachers incorporate curriculum dedicated to youth empowerment, especially for emergent bilingual and LGBTQ youth, as recognizing and honoring students' linguistic and epistemic privileges entails taking their claims about the world seriously. In this article, the author discusses…

This article discusses Al Souza's "Orlando City Maps," which was created not by adding colored ink to paper, but by cutting the printed paper away. Seven layers of pages are stacked upon one another and, except for the intact bottom layer, oval-shaped holes are cut through each page to reveal the layers below. When designing "Orlando City Maps,"…

Every year the author and his colleagues take their grade 12 English students to see four plays at one of Canada's major theaters. Chatting about the series on the last day of class, his students asked him if he had seen "the blue glow from the back row." Laughing at his bewilderment, they told him that during the performances so many…

A visual and theatrical exercise anchored in the Grades 11 and 12 Ontario Curriculum for Media Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies was enacted and recorded as individual experiences of each participant. The event was re-mastered in a graphic representation that depicts the forces, pushes and pulls of curriculum and students' needs which educators…

There is renewed interest in the role of arts education in the curriculum of U.S. public schools not only because of the intrinsic value of the arts and its believed impact on achievement, but because cultivating creativity is thought to promote innovation and fuel economic growth. Still, we know little about basic access to arts education. Using…