Despite ongoing and prolific critical scholarship arguing for the widening of the secondary language arts curriculum, many practicing teachers are required or encouraged to teach a curriculum dominated by canonical texts. This is often the case at schools with highly diverse students whose varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds have…

There is a transcendent force at work in the world, and its design for learning and life is far too complex to be executed through lesson plans and textbooks. In this article, the author describes a phone call from a student he taught in a high school English class 16 years earlier and has not seen since. After the student reveals how his life was…