Teaching British literature with a traditional curriculum does not offer students exposure to many females at all, either inside or outside of the text. There are female characters within many of the classic texts in the curriculum, but on further examination, we questioned the general picture of womanhood painted by them. So the authors showed…

This article uses Daniel José Older's Shadowshaper as the core of a unit challenging students and teachers to confront and dismantle systems of oppression.

According to the author, prior to a move, their classroom was overflowing with stuff on the walls, on the shelves, under the tables, in the file cabinets, and in the folders upon folders in their computer drive. It wasn't just the author's physical and virtual spaces that were full; their curriculum units were packed with lessons and activities,…

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.

Inspired by Leslie David Burns and Stergios G. Botzakis's efforts to demonstrate how texts recognized as exemplars by the Common Core State Standards could be used to address national standards and meet the needs of contemporary students, the author aims to illustrate how alternative nonfiction, nonprint texts--sports-based documentary…

In 1971, the year that "Masterpiece Theater" premiered on WGBH, the public television station in Boston, the author's family lived in London for the summer. Her life that summer had the taste and texture of an English novel, and she loved every minute of it, which might explain not only her choice to become an English teacher but also her lifelong…

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 describes the assignments the author created to engage preservice teachers in designing instructional materials that befit today's students to help them overcome hurdles sometimes present when learning classic literature. Secondary and middle school English teachers may find these assignments useful as well so their students, too,…

Integrating vocabulary games and activities more often into the structure of the day, Thomas B. Smith establishes a word-rich environment for high school students to experiment with unfamiliar words in varying, playful contexts. Smith asserts that giving frequent opportunities for hearing, speaking, and writing in the typical context of the day is…

For David E. Kirkland, the New English Education locates English language arts in the realities of youth, where texts emerge from students' lives, and the notions of reading and writing in English classrooms are open to revision. Kirkland reflects on how "postmodern Black experience, especially as seen in hip-hop, gives English teachers one way of…