The Common Core State Standards have placed more emphasis on the close reading of all texts, and have made a point of increasing the use of nonfiction in secondary English classrooms. In this article, the author describes an approach for implementing close reading of literary nonfiction. The approach comes from a small-scale classroom-based…

As the texts readers encounter in and out of school grow in complexity, the strategies that teachers demonstrate and encourage students to employ need to expand to accommodate the changing nature of these texts. In this article, the authors present a three-part framework for utilizing historical fiction picturebooks as instructional resources.…

In this article, the author explores youth participatory action research (YPAR) through gameplay. He describes Ask Anansi, an alternate reality game (ARG) played in the "real world" by weaving elements of storytelling and fiction into the environment played as part of class experience. This game which the author created drove the…

Creative writing has been the ugly stepsister in the English discipline for years. On one side, the literature scholars carry the torch for pure language, and, on the other side, the composition and rhetoric theorists approach writing like a science. Somewhere off in a dark corner, the creative writing staff loiters, getting paid to do nothing…

Narrative research has become part of the landscape of education inquiry, yet its theory and practice are still debated and evolving. This article addresses the construction of narratives using literary elements common to nonfiction and fiction writings. The authors discuss these elements and use four narratives to illustrate them. They address…

States that the Progressive Novella Project for high school students involves the collaborative writing of a 35-50 page novella. Explains that prior to the actual writing process, students are educated in the basic elements of fiction writing. Describes the division of labor into groups. Comments that the results of the project are invariably…

A 9th grade Honors English class creates and publishes original poems, art, fiction, and nonfiction products through an activity called "Type Three -- Twenty Time = T4." The instructional method merges elements from Renzulli's Type III process with elements from Brookhouser's 20Time Project-based learning model. Each student researches…

In this paper I call for an emotional confrontation with our traumatic, racist, and often unacknowledged history. I share ideas, experiences, and pedagogical strategies with which to engage difficult dialogue about difficult knowledge, in such a way as to disarm defense and, potentially inspire anti-racist activism in education and beyond. The…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English Language Arts seem to relegate fiction and poetry to the back shelf. This change in emphasis, favoring nonfiction, has an impact in the classroom. After districts and schools realign the curriculum, many English teachers feel compelled to put away some of their fiction and poetry units. One way to…

In this article, the author describes the Comic Book Project, which encourages students to address social issues in their lives and schools with art and creativity. The project, founded and directed by Dr. Michael Bitz of Columbia University's Teachers' College in New York, aims primarily to promote literacy. It also gives children an empowering…

Describes how a teacher found literature for Upward Bound students. Presents Geoffrey Canada's "Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America" as a nonfiction work to provide clarity and connections that might not have been available in a fictional work, yet it had elements of literary fiction that made the text…

The article deals with the problems of colloquial interrogative sentences having the function features in the source and target fiction texts. The importance of the research of interrogative sentences is defined by frequent use of questioning in the process of communication and a close connection of the problem of questioning with other…

Showing ten-minute movie clips can be an effective way to motivate students to read literature and to teach elements of fiction, namely plot, character, setting, symbol, irony, and theme. A clip from "And Then There Were None" may be used to teach various elements of plot, including conflict and the four types of conflict (man vs. man,…

Author Gada Mahrouse begins this article by saying that the terms "intersectional" and "transnational" are widely misunderstood and misused by academics. She writes that the first, "intersectionality," has become a buzzword, not only in feminist courses but also in mainstream disciplines and areas of research. She…

Readers often think of nonfiction as an information experience and not as a story experience, and indeed many nonfiction titles are task oriented, teaching readers how to knit or outlining the process of building a fence. But there is a huge body of nonfiction that is both informative and story-based. New nonfiction classics like Jon Krakauer's…