After several years of tweaking the protocols for a student- led poetry project, the call for this issue prompted the author to share what she and her students have learned and are still learning about reading poetry. This includes a now- eighth- grade student, Grace. Grace considers herself a "good" student, eager to learn, but she also…

This article describes a teacher's willingness to perform an autobiographical spoken word poem in his classroom, which provided an important model for students as they composed and shared their own slam-style poems.

While teaching in Taiwan, Ah-Young Song found that asking students for midterm self-reflections helped them to be more attuned to their distinct educational trajectories and that their comments provided useful insights into adjustments that could be made as a teacher. This article describes how two of those English language learners from the…

Chosen spaces are community organizations and programs, elective classes, and/or extracurricular clubs that students choose to participate in and have the agency to refuse their membership in. The youth's chosen spaces represent an alternate possibility for what English language arts (ELA) education could look like and how it might better sustain…

This article demonstrates a step-by-step teaching method using a poem, a play, and a short essay to help students support each other and take responsibility for learning.

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.

Web-based digital video (DV) applications such as Animoto, Magistro, and Videolicious allow users without technical experience to easily create quality video by matching up appropriate images with text and sound. DV's multimedia capabilities encourage students to become more proficient in new literacies as well as new technologies. This piece…

Through a case study of a seventh-grade ELA teacher, this article examines New Literacies pedagogy and more specifically a digital video project amid high-stakes testing pressures that often place limitations on teaching and learning.

There is an educational disconnect between students' individual backgrounds and the instruction that they traditionally receive in school (Darling-Hammond 3). This division is even more severe for black, Latino/Latina, and economically underprivileged students, who often lack the support, experience, or resources to fully engage in…

In this article, the author narrates his lifelong relationship with a major American poet, Walt Whitman. He describes how Whitman's "Song of Myself" and poetic idea influenced his life and way of thinking.

When asked by a principal to design a workshop for ELA and ESL teachers on addressing new ESL regulations, the author suggested that they offer professional development that might inspire teachers to try new practices that could help their students grow as writers. The author decided to devote a workshop not to rules and regulations, but to…

The author has always had an appreciation of language--its rhythms, sounds, wordplay, dialects, usage variations, and powers to manipulate. Reflecting on how she came to this appreciation, she remembers her father reciting poems to her when she was a little girl. She was enthralled by the rhythm, the rhyme, and the sounds of the words--both…

Of all the material in the English language arts curricula, poetry seems to cause the most consternation among teachers. For a number of teachers, and many students, poetry continues to be a difficult topic to teach and learn. In this article, the author focuses on the ways that young adult literature can help teachers expose their students to…

Writing creative nonfiction means perceiving what details are worth telling, why they might matter, and how they might connect. Although no one much likes the term "creative nonfiction" (some are bothered by defining something by what it's not, others by a conviction that the idea is oxymoronic), it has emerged as the name of choice. In the past…

When the author first started teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) students, she was incredibly naive about the second language acquisition process. One of the first moves she made was to look at the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) goals, and she began to think about the purposes and situations in which her…