In Aotearoa New Zealand we need an informed educational response to the environmental crisis within and across all learning areas in the curriculum. One way of organising that response is through the concept of eco-literacy. This article explains the concept of eco-literacy developed within the TLRI project Tuhia ki Te Ao--Write to the Natural…

Secondary students with learning disabilities (LD) can benefit from using assistive and instructional technologies to support content and skill acquisition. Digital pens have features that can be beneficial for students who struggle with comprehension, note taking, and organization. Livescribe pens, in particular, provide a variety features that…

This report brief describes district-level ACT test results for AISD seniors in the 2016-2017 school year.

The 1966 Anglo-American Seminar at Dartmouth certainly stands as a landmark event in the history of English teaching. For the purposes of this Special Issue, however, I want to unsettle some familiar interpretations of Dartmouth by reading with and against a range of American responses to the conference published in the late 1960s and 1970s. As an…

The authors describe how an Author-Out poetry writing workshop challenges students' pervading beliefs and assumptions about poetry and cultivates students' proficiency as readers and writers of poems.

The authors identify the necessity of focusing on and pluralizing understandings of transgender youth experiences and trans-specific topics. This is especially important for preservice teachers, who will be the ones to have similar discussions with their own students in the future. The authors describe a series of classroom activities and…

In "Finding a Language", Peter Medway addresses questions of central importance to English teaching--questions of curriculum and of pedagogy. How he addresses these questions provides a sharp contrast to the current orthodoxies of a rigidly prescriptive national curriculum and a closely monitored regime of objective-led, skills-based…

This article explores Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as a powerful practice that re-imagines the who, what, why, and how of research in the English classroom. Three educators share classroom journeys in helping students ask and answer questions about their worlds in ways that inspire personal, academic, and civic change.

Correct grammar is important for precise, accurate, academic prose, but the traditional skills-based approach to teaching grammar is not effective if the goal is good writing. The sentence-combining approach shows promise. However, sentence modeling is more likely to produce strong writing and enhance reading comprehension. Through sentence…

The author, who teaches the English Methods class in the credential program, knew from entries in students' Writer's Reader's Notebooks (Rief) that they were struggling with the articles assigned about a five-paragraph essay. Following a discussion of form-first instruction and CCSS assessments, this article provides concrete suggestions for…

This article presents ways to incorporate the works of artist Edward Hopper in the ELA secondary classroom. Students analyze Hopper's paintings as a text and create their own responses in the form of poetry, short story, photography, and other visual media.

The term "clause" is not only applied to structures which comply with formal prerequisites, containing a subject and a predicate conveyed by a finite verb, but also to such structures which are analysable into clause elements. The verbless clause is a structure containing no verb element at all (either finite or nonfinite), usually…

This article encourages English language arts and reading (ELAR) teachers to take hold of their ability to thrive in the classroom by suggesting three practices that will facilitate that quest. Many ELAR teachers show the signs of burnout and a defeatist mindset too early in their careers. The author seeks to provide constructive ways for teachers…

Increasing numbers of high schools are offering senior-year transition curricula in math and English to better prepare graduating students for college. These transition curricula are typically full-year, high school credit-bearing courses taken by students at risk of being placed into developmental (also known as remedial) courses upon enrollment…

Many have argued that English classrooms have an important role to play in supporting students' development of critical consciousness and civic engagement (Kirkland 406; Lyiscott 48). Recently, Monique Cherry-McDaniel called for English teachers to design "woke" learning opportunities that would support students' critical consciousness…