The role and significance of schooling in maintaining and renewing social disadvantage is particularly evident in upper secondary education, and especially so in the high-stakes final examination at the end of Year 12. This paper focusses on Senior English in this context, with specific regard to the Australian state of New South Wales. Building…

The COVID pandemic caused changes in education of which we may never know or understand all its repercussions to the public education system. One group of vulnerable students, newcomers from Guatemala and Honduras with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE), were negatively affected. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one SLIFE program sent…

The purpose of this study was to gauge the effects of offering LGBTQIA+ novels to students in an English Language Arts and Reading high school setting. Most novel options for students come from old books available in the school's book closet consisting of antiquated stories offering little in the way of diversity. Students are more likely to be…

This study aimed to determine the perspectives of Louisiana high school students, particularly Black students, on the diversity of the state-mandated Tier 1 English I curriculum and the correlation between their academic self-concept, curriculum diversity perceptions, and their achievement level on the LEAP 2025 English I high stakes assessment.…

Selecting diverse texts is vital for creating culturally inclusive and responsive literacy classrooms. However, despite growing student diversity and a push for multicultural literature curricular adoption, little impact has been made on secondary teacher multicultural text selection. This text selection stagnation begs further examination amidst…

This paper presents an analysis of the prescribed text list for senior school English (including English as an Additional Language or Dialect, EAL/D) in Queensland, Australia. Queer understandings about the normalization of cisgender and heterosexuality provide a framework to analyze prescribed texts for adolescent learners. Hetero-cisgender norms…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of selected demographic factors on the academic achievement of high school students. More specifically, this study was concerned with the effects of the variables gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) scores in Mathematics,…

Considering teens' progressive reading decline and disinterest, this mixed methods quasi-experimental study investigated the impact of providing high school students freedom to choose books in English class on their reading volume and reading identities. In a rural Midwestern school, the control group followed a traditional English curriculum with…

Project-based learning (PBL) grounds instruction in authentic learning experiences where students engage in real-world explorations that culminate in a final product or performance. We report on a mixed methods study with 43 ninth-grade English language arts (ELA) teachers (22 PBL and 21 comparison) and 1,671 students exploring the feasibility of…

This study analyzed some student-centered strategies used in three secondary classrooms in a large, urban high school in US. The researcher, who was teaching a graduate methods course at the local university, conducted classroom observations and follow-up interviews with three teachers enrolled in the class. The teachers learned about different…

The purpose of this study was to understand the influence the Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education (Right to Freedom) law has had on New Hampshire public high school English teachers. This study explores how the onset of this law may cause teachers to avoid diverse and multicultural literature in their curriculum…

This paper explores the continued cultural consecration of narrow forms of knowledge and literate practice in senior Australian English curricula. Despite the prevalence of Personal Growth approaches to English throughout Australia in the latter decades of the Twentieth century, the analysis of curricula reveals a contradiction between stated…

This practitioner inquiry study investigates learning from the stories of emergent bilingual students as they complete project based learning units. This method of instruction created the space to have one-on-one conversations, listen in culturally responsive ways, and develop asset-based literacy curriculum. I argue that relationships formed…

The authors of this report build on past studies by using survey data from a nationally representative sample to examine how middle and high school English language arts (ELA) and mathematics teachers use and perceive their instructional materials in terms of engagement, challenge, and usability. In addition, the authors use interview data to…