A teacher remembers her classroom as it used to be before the pandemic as she prepares for a new year of unknowns. Brieanne R. Lucy reflects how before COVID-19 and schools were closed, students in her English class would stand in a circle and read their first thoughts aloud. Students would showcase their command of repetition for effect, sensory…

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…

"Transcendentalism" refers to philosophical, religious, and literary beliefs held by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, and other writers in New England during the 1830s and 1840s. Emerson believed in the significance of one's intuition and individuality. He expresses these beliefs in his…

In this article, the authors share what they learned from their study of writing communities, which they refer to as writing groups, during the 2017-18 school year. The authors propose a conceptual framework for writing groups that engages students in the process of designing and participating as writers with their peers. The framework emphasizes…

In this article, the authors share discoveries about how taking risks can expand students' and teachers' narrow experiences with academic writing. The article outlines four teaching strategies one of the authors implemented in her classroom, highlighting how these strategies fostered student and teacher flexibility, agency, and confidence in…

The UK's "Prime Minister's Questions"--a television program that shows parliamentary proceedings and banter between House of Commons members--can be a free, real-world resource for rhetorical analysis opportunities. In this article, the author presents the inherent value of these sessions in the classroom as a means of creatively…

The American edition of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" has significant changes from the original British version, and every word of a Harry Potter book in translation derives from a translator's decision-making process. Focusing students on British-to-American cultural translation problems in the Harry Potter series encourages…

The author primarily teaches traditional high school English texts in a largely white, middle-class school, but the method she uses allows her to address important issues relevant to students. One unit she teaches is an investigation of the criminal justice system and a variety of issues related to the school-to-prison pipeline. A crucial text…

In contemporary contexts, young people are accustomed to life story; indeed, their lives are saturated with constructions of their stories and those of others, whether created by themselves or their "friends" on social networks. Multimedia outlets convey often detailed stories of more-famous others, whether celebrities or those experiencing…

This article describes an instructional lesson the author developed to help students use parody to read and write original poetry. The author begins this article with an introduction to parody and a rationale for using it as an instructional strategy. Then, he describes materials and procedures he used and he shares samples of student writing. He…

"Not reading," even for many good students, has become a mode of operation with respect to book-length texts assigned in school. Many students enter secondary and postsecondary literature classes "intending" to "not read" the books teachers assign. More students than teachers want to admit do not complete assigned reading, choosing instead to…

Engaging 9th grade students in contemporary reality-show parodies based on "Great Expectations," the author helps students explore the intricacies of Charles Dickens's novel. In "Stay Tuned for Our Next Episode: Teaching 'Great Expectations' in Installments," the author highlighted the benefits of teaching "Great Expectations" in installments, as…

Curious about the connections between the author's students' reading tastes and those of 19th-century readers, the author read Nina Baym's excellent text "Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America" to gain a sense of how readers in the 1800s might have thought about the texts that they read. Nineteenth-century…

One of the most persistent challenges facing teachers is the need to provide effective literacy instruction for adolescent English language learners (ELLs). The literacy crisis for these students is a compelling one; only 4% of eighth-grade ELLs scored at the proficient or advanced level on the reading portion of the 2005 National Assessment for…

To provide insight into the issue of multimodal literacy instruction, the authors explore presentation techniques and instructional activities employed in their secondary language arts classes. They collaborate on assignments that focus students on "anchored media instruction" and engage them in producing multimodal, technology-infused projects,…