African American males have consistently scored lower than their peers on national reading assessments for the last 50 years (Ladd, 2017). These readers are among many students who find their reading motivation wanes as they matriculate through school. Reading attitudes of middle schoolers are also generally negative. This qualitative case study…

Boys have long been positioned as marginalised participants in the education system, where categorical notions of boys as failing and girls as achieving persist. These ideas have played out strongly in western societies in the areas of literacy and reading, with a convergence of boys and literacy 'crises'. While it has been documented that some…

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of a collaborative inquiry group of middle school ELA teachers who were utilizing the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) framework to create a virtual library of e-books, examine students' reading motivation data, and implement classroom practices intended to increase student reading value, motivation,…

This single instrument case study illuminates the aesthetic transactions an adolescent male student constructs in response to an experimental Gothic studies reading unit implemented by his cooperating teacher over a sixth month period in his seventh grade ELA (English/ Language Arts) class. Ray is described as ''lazy' regarding academic reading…

Much has been written about the "boy crisis" in the last two decades in regards to achievement in school and the struggles boys face in literacy learning. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data demonstrate that girls consistently outperform boys in reading and writing (Educational Alliance, 2006). Therefore, the…

National concern about the reading proficiency of adolescents and the alarming statistics on the literacy achievement of African American males have created much interest in the topic of "motivated literacy" for researchers, policy makers, and educators. African American twelfth graders perform at the same level in reading as White…

This article is about a book club for middle school boys. The idea of a book club for boys came from the author's concern about what he had been hearing and reading about boys falling behind in their reading abilities. The purpose of establishing the club was to discover from the boys themselves what could be done to support them in their reading.…

As a middle school librarian in Austin, Texas, the author has been running weekly book clubs for years, which covered many genres that appeal to a wide cross section of kids. When approached by a group of Latino boys from low-income families, the author was inspired to run a Bluford High book club for reluctant readers. The author shares how she…

In this article, the author relates how she helped organize the Middle School Community Read project, a community reading project for middle school students in her school district. The project aimed to reverse the trend of a community experiencing loss of male readers as they become teens. First, the author and her group formed a small committee…