In the Pursuit of Justice: Students’ Rights to Read and Write in Elementary School (Principles in Practice)

Benelly Alvarez

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)

Let's face it: in this age of exploding literacies, all teachers of literature should be teachers of reading. Reading is interpreting; interpreting is reading, which is why it's more crucial than ever to ensure that our students are able to make meaning as they read. But do we know how to integrate best practices in reading instruction into our classrooms? In _Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading: Lessons for Teachers of Literature_, Deborah Appleman dismantles the traditional divide between secondary teachers of literature and teachers of reading and offers a variety of practical ways to teach reading within the context of literature classrooms. As part of NCTE's Principles in Practice imprint, the book draws on research-based understandings emerging from Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief, woven together with practical lessons that will enrich the reading experiences of all students. Using real-world examples from diverse secondary classrooms, Appleman helps literature teachers find answers to the questions they have about teaching reading: How can I help students negotiate the complex texts that they will encounter both in and out of the classroom? What are the best ways to engage whole classes in a variety of texts, both literary and nonliterary? What does it mean to be a struggling reader and how can I support these students? How can I inspire and motivate the male readers in my classes?

Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading (Principles in Practice)

Literature & Fiction

Appleman, Deborah

History & Criticism

Drawing from the work of high school teachers across the country, Adventurous Thinking illustrates how advocating for students' rights to read and write can be revolutionary work. Ours is a conflicted time: the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, for instance, run parallel with increasingly hostile attitudes toward immigrants and prescriptive K-12 curricula, including calls to censor texts. Teachers who fight to give their students the tools and opportunities to read about and write on topics of their choice and express ideas that may be controversial are, in editor Mollie V. Blackburn's words, "revolutionary artists, and their teaching is revolutionary art." 
 The teacher chapters focus on high school English language arts classes that engaged with topics such as immigration, linguistic diversity, religious diversity, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, interrogating privilege, LGBTQ people, and people with physical disabilities and mental illness. Following these accounts is an interview with Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give, and an essay by Millie Davis, former director of NCTE's Intellectual Freedom Center. The closing essay reflects on provocative curriculum and pedagogy, criticality, community, and connections, as they get taken up in the book and might get taken up in the classrooms of readers. 
 The book is grounded in foundational principles from NCTE's position statements The Students' Right to Read and NCTE Beliefs about the Students' Right to Write that underlie these contributors' practices, principles that add up to one committed declaration: Literacy is every student's right. Principles in Practice imprint

Adventurous Thinking: Fostering Students' Rights to Read and Write in Secondary ELA Classrooms (Principles in Practice)

Mollie V. Blackburn

Essays & Correspondence

Literacies Before Technologies: Making Digital Tools Matter for Middle Grades Learners (Principles in Practice Technology in the Classroom)

Reference

Hicks, Troy

Runstrom, Jill

Words, Language & Grammar

For a long time, composition's pedagogical conversation has been defined by its theoretical disagreements. Is learning a cognitive process or a social one? Is the self expressed or distributed? Can writing be understood as a process, or is any process too messy to be understood? These debates have finally run out of steam, argues Paul Lynch, leaving composition in a "postpedagogical" moment, a moment when the field no longer believes that pedagogical theories can account for the complexities of teaching. _After Pedagogy_ extends the postpedagogical conversation by turning to the experience of teaching itself. Through the work of John Dewey, _After Pedagogy_ argues that experience offers an arena in which theory and practice can coexist. Most important, experience can fashion the teachable moments of postpedagogical practice into resources for further growth. "We cannot know what precisely the student will do with what we have offered," says Lynch, "but we can think with the student about the experience of the offer itself." By turning what students and teachers know about writing into an area of intellectual inquiry, a philosophy of experience can make teaching sustainable after pedagogy. CCCC/NCTE Studies in Writing &amp; Rhetoric (SWR) Series.

After Pedagogy: The Experience of Teaching (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric)

Lynch, Paul

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Sharon Mitchler argues for a reconfiguration of critical pedagogy to empower and engage American literature students in rural community colleges. She constructs a pedagogy that addresses the multiple positions of power and marginalization rural students occupy, often concurrently. 
Drawing on feminist pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and conceptualizations of rural places, she develops a theory of critical rural pedagogy that builds on the work of Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen Schell. Critical rural pedagogy actively seeks to engage rural students to bring their lived experiences to the college classes, not only to individual classrooms but to other forms of higher education as community college students transfer on to university settings. The book includes activities and examples to model classroom practice.

Critical Rural Pedagogy

Education & Teaching

Mitchler, Sharon

Higher & Continuing Education

This collection of activities for the composition classroom includes dozens of practical, useful, successful, and accessible exercises that have been developed and implemented by writing instructors from all over the country. Editors Michal Reznizki and David T. Coad have assembled a collection of tried-and-proven teaching activities to help both novice and experienced teachers plan, prepare, and implement writing instruction in college. As two educators who have been teaching writing in the field for more than a decade, they have created the resource they wished they had.

Dynamic Activities for First-Year Composition: 96 Ways to Immerse, Inspire, and Captivate Students

Workshopping the Canon for Democracy and Justice adopts and adapts foundational reading and writing workshop structures for democratic and justice teaching in the context of the middle and secondary classroom and curriculum.\nThrough workshopping, teachers can foster democratic dispositions and skills as they explore justice-oriented units focused around core canonical texts, or teachers may elect to disrupt and displace the canon by teaching a thematically related contemporary text. Critical essential questions interweave texts and bind units. Genres including young adult novels, short stories, informational texts, picture books, music, art, movies, and social media are included in the Appendixes. These diverse resources make current societal/global connections, foster multiple perspectives, prompt critical thinking, and include primary voices. This book, filled with teacher voices, useful models, and helpful ideas, is written to foster agency for change in society, teachers, and students.

Workshopping the Canon for Democracy and Justice

Styslinger, Mary E.

Politics & Social Sciences

Carol Jago offers readers a handy guide for bringing this celebrated author's work into the classroom. The second volume in the NCTE High School Literature Series, this companion to _Nikki Giovanni in the Classroom_ includes biographical information, ideas for literature circles using Walker's short stories, sample writing lessons using Walker's poems, suggestions for teaching _The Color Purple_, and a wealth of resources for further investigation of Alice Walker and her work.

Alice Walker in the Classroom: "Living by the Word" (THE NCTE High School Literature Series)

Jago, Carol

By showcasing their experiences and activities, and positioning NCTE policy statements―The Students' Right to Read and NCTE Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write―as foundational guiding documents, Ochoa and her colleagues prove that even in today’s standards-driven environment, authentic reading and writing practices can create literacy-rich middle school classrooms.\nTo help all middle school educators encourage their students to build literate lives both within the classroom and well beyond it, veteran middle school teacher Jennifer Ochoa has brought together middle school teachers and teacher leaders, children’s author and We Need Diverse Books cofounder Ellen Oh, children’s literature scholar Kristin McIlhagga, reading and writing workshop teacher-author Linda Rief, and censorship expert Millie Davis to examine current middle school literacy practices that support students’ rights to read and write. By showcasing their experiences and activities, and positioning NCTE policy statements―The Students' Right to Read and NCTE Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write―as foundational guiding documents, Ochoa and her colleagues prove that even in today’s standards-driven environment, authentic reading and writing practices can create literacy-rich middle school classrooms. As a bonus, teachers who don’t have strong support in their schools to implement these practices will find a myriad of suggestions for developing a virtual personal learning network―a grassroots professional development tailored to their needs and interests―that will support them in their efforts to help kids as readers and writers.

Already Readers and Writers: Honoring Students' Rights to Read and Write in the Middle Grade Classroom (Principles in Practice)

Anderson, Heather

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Books by National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)