This article describes literacy practices and outdoor activities in high school English classrooms--framed as critical rambling, a pedagogy seeking to raise awareness of issues like climate justice--with illustrations from a dissertation of teacher research and additional student work.

The digital is inextricably woven across people's everyday lives and literacy practices, and English educators are tasked with preparing students to be critical, ethical, and agentic inventors and consumers of digital text. What has crystallized for English educators is an awareness that facilitating "digital discourse"--or the multiple…

Many secondary English language arts (ELA) teachers are aware of the recent bills aimed at controlling which texts are available to students, how those texts are taught, and classroom discourse on issues like racism and rights for members of LGBTQIA+ communities. In the face of book bans and attempts to control classroom discourse, this article…

In this article, the authors share discoveries about how taking risks can expand students' and teachers' narrow experiences with academic writing. The article outlines four teaching strategies one of the authors implemented in her classroom, highlighting how these strategies fostered student and teacher flexibility, agency, and confidence in…

The science of artificial intelligence, or AI, is leaping ahead as more resources are focused on its promise. In this article, the authors discuss the ways in which we have explored significant, critical questions about AI in a college literature course through reading young adult (YA) novels. Although it's improving, AI or machine intelligence is…

Nearly every teacher will experience loss and grief during their years in the classroom. And yet, too often the profession assumes that English language arts (ELA) teachers must hide the emotions that accompany loss. In this article the authors share strategies for supporting English teachers in making sense of their grieving experiences and…

In this article, the authors share what they learned from their study of writing communities, which they refer to as writing groups, during the 2017-18 school year. The authors propose a conceptual framework for writing groups that engages students in the process of designing and participating as writers with their peers. The framework emphasizes…

"Transcendentalism" refers to philosophical, religious, and literary beliefs held by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, and other writers in New England during the 1830s and 1840s. Emerson believed in the significance of one's intuition and individuality. He expresses these beliefs in his…

Having students read news articles or novels, watch television snippets, engage in class discussions, essay-writing, emailing, and drafting letters are excellent ways to broach any number of society's systemic and oppressive social maladies. Engaging in these activities in the English language arts classroom can serve as a catalyst to encourage…

Many teachers develop oral communication skills through questioning, discussion, Socratic seminars, think-pair-shares, jigsaws, and small-group projects. To these activities the author has added poetry under the auspices of Poetry Out Loud, a national program that asks students to memorize and recite poems. On its website (www.poetryoutloud.org/),…

The author asks, "Where can we, as English language arts teachers, create room in our classrooms for curiosity--for students and for ourselves?" She outlines ways to use Genius Hour to help create an equitable, level classroom with access and ownership for all.

In this article, the authors explore multimodal literacies and how they use literacy contracts and quadrants to help students to examine their identities via writing and the creative arts. A notable outcome of their joint efforts is that when teachers and students transacted with multimodal literacies, they showed value for their personal and…

In this article, the authors examine how social media memes can manipulate and polarize audiences and provide teaching approaches for student learning, understanding, and action. The authors describe the four-step instructional approach they use to guide preservice English language arts (ELA) teachers and their secondary students in recognizing…

During the 2016-2017 academic year, a collaborative of university faculty and high school teachers piloted an innovative approach to professional development, focusing on secondary level literacy in a diverse suburban district. The approach included innovations in both process and content compared to professional development (PD) and instructional…

In this article, the authors (Aaron Guggenheim, a White cisgender researcher and English Language Arts (ELA) teacher, and David Glover, a mixed-race, cisgender former ELA teacher) explore how a digital writing project on podcasting enacted with eleventh and twelfth graders provided opportunities to uncover the students' hidden identities as…