Conducting primary research through digital video (DV) can allow students to experience meaning-making firsthand, gaining empathy and understanding for their subjects. Two practical reasons for encouraging students to use DV are that students are already using the technology outside of school and that the digital culture demands digital literacy.…

This article offers playwriting and other arts-based literacies as dynamic and multifaceted alternatives to the traditional high school research paper. The authors present an analysis of what happened when a teacher asked students to conduct research on a human rights issue and represent their research in a five-scene play. They contend that…

This article examines how to use performance-related resources to teach research skills. In particular, it focuses on Shakespeare's "Othello" and argues that linking research and performance helps students put their ideas in conversation with other sources to articulate research-based arguments about a text.

This article discusses how writing assignments focused on sports controversies provide students with opportunities to read, write, research, and debate in ways that feel authentic and meaningful. Athletes dominate the headlines about everything from dog fighting to domestic violence. Sports controversies are appropriate material for teaching…

The author details the pedagogy that empowered his high school students to use poetry as a part of a theatrical inquiry into race and whiteness. Using elements of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in concert with playbuilding, The Whiteness Project was the author's attempt as a high school English and Drama teacher to build a…

This article discusses one teacher's efforts to give their students a mentor text for a persuasive, research-based writing project. The author's shift from assigning predominantly fiction to focusing more on nonfiction came as a result of their efforts to help their students move from students' current writing style -- that of a five-paragraph…

This article describes how adolescent students learn to question their lives and contexts through the "Crossing Boundaries" podcast assignment. In the assignment, the students pick a topic, design a project, interview at least one other individual, and analyze their data. The students do not realize they are engaging in original…

The authors investigate how innovative research assignments based on students' personal interests can help them want to develop their research skills. They find that multimodal communication and representation, including film, written scripts, comic strips, music, and photography, encourage students to carefully select information from the…

This article shows how students confront offensive language head-on by researching its history and reconsidering its use in contemporary conversation. It describes an assignment in which students study the histories and social reception of words (in some cases considered obscenities) used to insult people of various social categories. Students…

The author helps some kids make personal connections to what can seem irrelevant within the confines of classroom and curriculum. Interestingly, though, the most meaningful connections she has made with students have come not through quirky English teaching, but through her extracurricular interloping into the realm of social studies. The most…

Using the overarching concept of the role of an outcast in society, high school teacher Sandra Whitaker persuades urban students to explore the relevance among their lives, the district-required reading, and research on historical and contemporary outcasts. From the unit, students gain an appreciation for Hawthorne and, importantly, ascertain the…

As online research has become an increasingly standard activity for middle school and high school students, Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) has simultaneously emerged as the bane of many teachers who include research-focused assignments in their courses. An online encyclopedia that allows anyone to edit its entries, Wikipedia has educators…

Eighth-grade teacher Lesley Roessing designed an assignment that makes individual student research useful and accessible to the entire class. She outlines steps students take to create a guide to supplement their reading of "Waiting for the Rain: A Novel of South Africa." She then builds on the research experience in another unit by addressing…

Reexamines what it means to conduct research. Emphasizes the importance of collaborative research, and recommends ways to encourage collaboration in students' research projects. (MM)

In this article, the author vitalizes her British literature course by asking seniors to investigate, through an I-Search paper, the concept of heroism. Students research a historic or contemporary individual, drawing on their understanding of heroic literary figures previously studied, and interview family, community members, and others connected…