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.

In this article, the authors describe how integrating music with reading and writing practices stimulated transmediation to (1) honor musical students' identities, (2) deepen readers' meaning making with literature, and (3) invite writers' memories to generate emotional grist for composing poetry. The authors share examples to inspire teachers to…

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/),…

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…

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.

This article explores using spoken word poetry and song analysis in the classroom to inspire students to analyze their identities and strive for social justice in their research efforts. Poetry is empowering. It can show students how people express themselves, push them to consider their own identities, and inspire them to seek social change.…

The author had been assigned two sections of Contemporary Literature, a semester-long senior elective, and he wanted to do something new with poetry. He planned to teach Arthur Sze's "Quipu." Sze's poetry is nonlinear, adopting principles from science, anthropology, and history into a multilayered poetic texture--text unlike anything students…

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…

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets--an excellent moment to focus on them, as well as on those written by others before and after 1609. Because these authors share an enthusiasm for poetry in general and the sonnet in particular, they want to encourage teachers to include…

As a teacher of Bowling Green State University's English 3810, Grammar and Writing, the author is charged with teaching future language arts teachers how to teach grammar so that it actually helps their students become better writers and communicators. Because such teaching rejects the ineffective but time-honored drill-it-and-kill-it approach, in…

English teachers share the blame for the lack of imaginative responses from students to the texts they bring to students, given their penchant for focusing on the most technical elements of literature rather than on its emotional resonance. In classrooms, teachers often concentrate too heavily on what Janet Allen calls the "products" of their…

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…

A former high school teacher's reflections on the connections between basketball and poetry suggest the significance of extracurricular activities for teachers and students. W. Douglas Baker recounts how he guided students to make connections among "the collision of activities in their lives" by delving into the practices and discourses of three…