Edited by Detra Price-Dennis this first volume of Special Issues: Racial Literacy gathers some of the most compelling and practical recent articles across NCTE journals addressing the importance of racial literacy and its implications for curriculum pedagogy and policy. 

There’s a great deal of uncertainty discord and increased volatility across a number of critical institutions in our society. Each day on social media and TV news outlets we read listen to and/or watch events unfold that are linked to political economic health legal and educational inequities that can be traced to racist ideologies and practices. Public schools across the country are being subjected to pending state legislation and new laws that seek to limit how race—among other markers of identity—can be taught in K–12 classrooms. 

Editor Detra Price-Dennis has curated this collection to show how teaching from a racial literacy perspective is in conversation with antiracist culturally responsive equity-oriented frameworks that uplift curriculum design and instructional strategies. These articles can help educators (re)imagine the classroom as a space that supports the development of racial literacy skills and practices with their students.

About the Special Issue series:

Most teachers and students across the country are grappling with several important issues. We hear from many educators who are looking for compelling and engaging approaches racial literacy critical media literacy and trauma-informed teaching. 

NCTE is responding to these needs with Special Issues a series of books designed to directly address these pressing topics in K-12 and college classrooms today. The first volumes collect content on these topics from across all of NCTE’s journals in one place to make the most relevant material accessible and practical. 

Edited by expert practitioners in the field each volume contains teaching tips to help implement these approaches in classrooms. 

During a time of increased book banning and censoring of scrutiny of the word critical and even calls for surveillance of K–12 teachers the burgeoning field of critical media literacy is more important than ever. These new challenges demonstrate the importance of teaching media literacy to address some of the most pressing needs of our youth. This second volume devoted to critical media literacy picks up where the first volume left off as it continues the work of defining this important area of focus and looks for practical and innovative ways to bring these important topics into ELA classrooms. Editors William Kist and Mary T. Christel have curated and edited a wide range of original essays by leading educators in the field focusing on pedagogical directions of critical media literacy integrating it into reading writing and interdisciplinary instruction and new ways of teaching about and with media.

Teach Living Poets opens up the flourishing world of contemporary poetry to secondary teachers.

It is designed to give advice on reading contemporary poetry discovering new poets and inviting living poets into the classroom as well as sharing sample lessons writing prompts and ways to become an engaged member of a professional learning community. 

The #TeachLivingPoets approach which has grown out of the vibrant movement and community founded by high school teacher Melissa Alter Smith and been codeveloped with poet and scholar Lindsay Illich offers rich opportunities for students to improve critical reading and writing opportunities for self-expression and social-emotional learning and perhaps the most desirable outcome the opportunity to fall in love with language and discover (or renew) their love of reading. The many poems included in Teach Living Poets are representative of the diverse poets writing today.

Macbeth a story of ambition terror and conscience speaks to our students and our era. Through differentiated instruction Lyn Fairchild Hawks offers myriad ways to engage students with different readiness levels and interests in this timeless tale of fear and courage order and chaos guilt and remorselessness. The book offers a wide range of exciting lesson ideas to challenge your learners including

• key scenes to teach
• big ideas and essential questions
• film analysis activities
• close reading assignments
• performance activities and
• preassessments and summative assessments. Macbeth can come alive for all students through independent reading options linked by theme activities and projects mirroring professional roles and relevance "hooks" to meet students' interests. Also included are a unit calendar DIY tips for lesson design and a companion website with more than forty ready-to-use handouts.

Drawing from ethnographic data collected in Indonesia from 2009 to 2022 this book explores how an English-medium Indonesian PhD program in interreligious studies and three Muslim scholar-activists activate knowledge where languages intersect a process mediated by material circumstances within Indonesia and voices past present and future that both are audience to and transcend the traditional geographic and discursive borders associated with them.

As they negotiate translingually to make meaning at the borderlands where seemingly discrete discourses intersect they challenge false divides between rationality and spirituality; between the mind and body; between female agency and Islam; and between English and non-Western meaning-making. By exploring how these scholar-activists engage in translingual praxis to move knowledge from the discursive plane to the material plane and back again to effect social justice across multiple and intersecting languages audiences and contexts this book opens up new ways of understanding translingual negotiation where feminist scholarly activism and Islamic belief intersect. CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric

In the latest volume in the NCTE High School Literature Series Rachel Endo offers new ways to talk and teach about the incarceration of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II. 

Incarceration of Japanese Americans in the 1940s uses the selected works of three critically acclaimed Japanese American authors: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir Farewell to Manzanar along with its film version; a sampling of Lawson Fusao Inada’s poetry; and a selection of Hisaye Yamamoto’s short stories. All three authors were children or young adults during World War II and their texts powerfully speak to how being racially profiled forcibly removed from their homes and then detained in racially segregated concentration camps for nearly three years forever changed their lives. 

This volume features author biographies guiding questions resources for teachers and student-centered activities that incorporate digital literacy. Assignments and discussion questions that appeal to multiple learning styles are included. With several student work samples as models each chapter includes practical ideas for the classroom including connecting common themes in Japanese American literature about World War II to contemporary social issues such as civil rights identity immigration reform and race relations.

The Lifespan Development of Writing presents the results of a four-year project to synthesize the research on writing development at different ages from multiple cross-disciplinary perspectives including psychological linguistic sociocultural and curricular.

Although writing begins early in life and can develop well into adulthood we know too little about how writing develops before during and after schooling as well as too little about how an individual’s writing experiences relate to one another developmentally across the lifespan. There is currently no adequate accepted theory of writing development that can inform the design of school curricula and motivate appropriate assessment practices across the years of formal education. 

The Lifespan Development of Writing is a first step toward understanding how people develop as writers over their lifetimes and presents the results of a four-year project to synthesize the research on writing development. First collectively offering the joint statement “Toward an Understanding of Writing Development across the Lifespan” the authors then focus individually on specific periods of writing development including early childhood adolescence and working adulthood looked at from different angles.

They conclude with a summative understanding of trajectories of writing development and implications for further research teaching and policy including the assertion that writing research “can raise our curricular vision beyond the easily measurable to recognize that writing development is far more than the accretion of easy testable skills and that successful writing development cannot be defined as movement toward a standard.”

Ted Kesler with a community of grade school teachers and students demonstrates how students’ creative responses lead to deep comprehension of diverse texts and ultimately help them to develop their literate identities.

The Reader Response Notebook (RRN) is a tried-and-true tool in elementary and middle school classrooms. However teachers and students often express frustration with this tool. Responses can read as though students are just going through the motions with little evidence of deep comprehension. With this book teacher educator and consultant Ted Kesler breathes new life into the RRN by infusing this work with three key practices: 

• Encouraging responses to reflect design work using a variety of writing tools
• Expanding what counts as text including popular culture texts that are important in students’ lives outside of school
• And making the RRN an integral part of a community of practice

Winner of the 2015 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award

Unlike much current writing studies research Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference addresses conversations about diversity in higher education institutional racism and the teaching of writing by taking a microinteractional look at the ways people define themselves and are defined by others within institutional contexts. Focusing on four specific peer review moments in a writing classroom Stephanie L. Kerschbaum reveals the ways in which students mark themselves and others as well as how these practices of marking are contextualized within writing programs and the broader institution. 

Kerschbaum’s unique approach provides a detailed analysis of diversity rhetoric and the ways institutions of higher education market diversity in and through student bodies as well as sociolinguistic analyses of classroom discourse that are coordinated with students’ writing and the moves they make around that writing. Each of these analyses is grounded in an approach to difference that understands it to be dynamic relational and emergent-in-interaction a theory developed out of Bakhtin’s ethical scholarship the author’s lived experience of deafness and close attention to students’ interactions with one another in the writing classroom. Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference enriches the teaching of writing by challenging forms of institutional racism enabling teachers to critically examine their own positioning and positionality vis-à-vis their students and highlighting the ways that differences motivate rich relationship building within the classroom.