A Symphony of Possibilities explores arts-based pedagogies for secondary teachers of English language arts. Drama music poetry public art and visual art are explored in detail by experts in their fields sharing proven methods of instruction with secondary students and teachers.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/><br/>In an educational environment that privileges scripted curricula and intensive preparation for high-stakes tests the arts offer a more hands-on approach to learning and problem solving challenging students to approach course material in personal and interactive ways. In A Symphony of Possibilities experts in their fields explore in detail arts-based pedagogies for secondary teachers of English language arts focusing on drama music poetry public art and visual art and sharing proven methods of instruction. Through the arts we see teachers and researchers who explore and expand on comprehension memory issues of identity and culturally relevant pedagogies and we see students excited by their active learning. Editors Katherine J. Macro and Michelle Zoss and their contributors provide creative approaches that help teachers accommodate the diversity of their students and their needs as well as move their students into innovative and thoughtful learning spaces. This book goes a long way toward answering the question What is the role of the arts for English teachers?

Grounded in NCTE’s position statements “The Students’ Right to Read” and “NCTE Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write” this book focuses on high school English language arts classes drawing from the work of seven teachers from across the country to illustrate how advocating for students’ rights to read and write can be revolutionary work.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/><br/>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.

Already Readers and Writers: Honoring Students' Rights to Read and Write in the Middle Grade Classroom is meant to 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.

About Principles in Practice

Books in the Principles in Practice imprint offer teachers concrete illustrations of effective classroom practices based in NCTE research briefs and policy statements.

Each book discusses the research on a specific topic links the research to an NCTE brief or policy statement and then demonstrates how those principles come alive in practice: by showcasing actual classroom practices that demonstrate the policies in action; by talking about research in practical teacher-friendly language; and by offering teachers possibilities for rethinking their own practices in light of the ideas presented in the books.

Beyond Standardized Truth included in the Principles in Practice imprint is the result of the author’s own efforts to bridge the gap between valuing reading and being able to respond with appropriate instruction or evaluate growth in reading. 

Scott Filkins brings us into his classroom and the classrooms of his colleagues to demonstrate how high school teachers across the disciplines can engage in inquiry-based reading assessment to support student learning. Based in the IRA–NCTE Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing Revised Edition the classroom portraits highlight the importance of incorporating genuinely formative assessment into our instruction. 

Filkins unpacks his own history with assessment through engaging “confessions” of his early practices and eventual growth toward a framework that situates reading assessment in an inquiry model. Throughout the book he showcases his colleagues’ attempts to use an inquiry framework including the various tools and documentation methods that help them inquire into their students’ habits and thoughts as readers use formative assessment to fuel the gradual release of responsibility framework and use reading assessment as a means of professional reflection. 

Finally Filkins challenges us to broaden the conversation about assessment to a wider range of stakeholders and offers a vision of assessment as an expression of care for the students in our charge.

A deep dive into the rich resources available for teaching Shakespeare’s plays Bring on the Bard is for every high school teacher—early career to veteran—looking for new hands-on activities to draw students of all ability levels into the work and world of Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare didn’t write his plays for readers; he wrote individual “cue scripts” for actors who hadn’t read the entire play but had to perform on the fly with almost no rehearsal. Those cue scripts have become the written form of his dramas compiled originally in the First Folio of 1623. And the actors’ cues for meaning emotion and emphasis are still embedded in Shakespeare’s language ripe for discovery by today’s students. 

Shakespeare’s plays rightly remain a staple of the ELA curriculum but evolving standards and youth culture itself challenge teachers to put students—not a text—at the center of a reading experience in order to support diverse readers and learners.

How can we do this? 

Experienced educators Kevin Long and Mary T. Christel introduce us to the Folio technique which builds on active drama approaches that position students to engage with a rich text through low-risk speaking and improvisation activities. Without requiring students to become actors the Folio technique helps them to discover the clues the Bard built into his works that allow actors to efficiently understand their characters’ text context and subtext. Teachers can use excerpts from the First Folio along with a mass market paperback or digital edition of a play to help students get closer to Shakespeare’s intentions; understand the language action and emotions of the characters; and perhaps even explore the challenges the Bard’s modern editors face.

The book offers suggestions for using parallel text graphic and abridged editions of Shakespeare’s works as well as activities using cue scripts and a variety of viewing experiences. 

Building Literate Communities: In Conversation with Sheridan Blau offers a rich collection of essays that honors and extends the contributions of Sheridan Blau to the fields of English education. It is required reading for educators and researchers committed to advancing learning instruction and practice. It is an essential resource for anyone invested in writing studies literature instruction literacy or teacher education. 

Blau and his work invite all of us into a conversation about how to best serve learner needs. This volume demonstrates the beauty of and need for building literate communities through collaboration discussion and action.

This collection includes:

• An account of Blau’s impact: Learn how Blau’s work has influenced communities of students teachers and scholars since the 1960s promoting a richer more collaborative approach to literacy learning and education.
• An in-depth examination of key issues in English education: Explore how Blau’s principles and practices continue to inform fields such as Composition and Literature Studies Professional Learning and Mentorship. Read about Blau’s leadership and legacy in the work of Professional Communities—including both the National Writing Project (NWP) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
• New work from leading voices in writing and literacy studies: Hear from scholars in the field about both the history of and projected future for English education.
• Inspiration and support for new and veteran educators: Wade into current pedagogical debates and discover innovative approaches to meet the needs of students and teachers in a rapidly changing educational landscape.

As a high school teacher Ricki Ginsberg realized that a truly student-centered classroom requires student input. To foster a more ethical community-based approach to curriculum design and instruction she worked with her students to reimagine and co-design existing grade-level courses and in doing so they integrated young adult literature as central to the curriculum and course design. In this book Ginsberg along with more than a dozen teacher contributors shares course design possibilities for teachers seeking to disrupt and reimagine traditional structures with the inclusion of YA literature. <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/><br/>With communities of practice as a guiding framework Challenging Traditional Classroom Spaces with YA Literature explores how teachers might work with students to build a community that defines their purposes together how they might investigate new possibilities for existing or traditional courses by harnessing the potential of YA literature how they might use critical freedom to co-develop YA electives and how they can lead literate lives together as a community of practice that is engaged with their local and global communities.<br/><br/>Grounded in NCTE’s Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature position statement this book offers both big ideas such as overarching structural decisions and pedagogical positioning as well as a wealth of flexible and adaptable practical strategies and ideas that can be implemented directly in secondary classrooms with varied contexts and purposes.

Classrooms should be spaces where every child feels safe to bring their whole self to school. This book shows how to set up preK–grade 6 classrooms that support student agency independence and choice. The results of classrooms designed with these goals in mind include: 

• Greater student engagement with curriculum
• Students who know themselves and are empowered as learners
• Students who feel valued and care about their learning as well as the learning of others
• A more cohesive authentic and accepting community of learners
• Opportunities for choice and decision-making by all learners

With examples drawn from real classrooms the authors demonstrate how to make choices in seating materials used books read and more. Special attention is paid to the design of classroom libraries in which a variety of diverse quality books anchor so much of the work in helping young readers and writers grow and learn.

The book is richly illustrated with photos and samples to provide an inside look at classrooms in which children are centered and the teacher is responsive to creating spaces with student agency in mind.

172 pp. 2023. Grades PreK–6

Aimed at accomplished veteran teachers Continuing the Journey offers practical advice encouragement and cutting-edge ideas for today’s English classroom. 

Coauthors Leila Christenbury and Ken Lindblom well-known teachers writers and former editors of English Journal are joined in this book by almost two dozen classroom teachers and researchers. Together they present real strategies for real classrooms and offer teachers ideas insights and support. Focused on literature and informational texts this lively book (the first in a series) is a road map to professional renewal and to becoming a better teacher. Topics include: 

• Changes in you your classroom and your school
• What it means to be a better teacher
• Teaching literary texts and literary nonfiction
• And incorporating the study of informational texts and of social media in your classroom

An innovative feature of the book—the Ideal Teachers’ Lounge—invites the voices of many highly regarded teachers and scholars to engage inspire and inform you about the challenging world of professional teaching. Vignettes from real classrooms infuse the book with practicality. Inviting collegial and knowledgeable Leila and Ken share their experience stories and ideas flavored with drama and humor. If you are a veteran English teacher well beyond the first-year jitters and ready to focus fully on the success of your students and your own professional growth Continuing the Journey both book and series is for you.

In this third book in the Continuing the Journey series Ken Lindblom and Leila Christenbury explore teaching English language speaking and listening. Aimed at veteran teachers yet accessible to highly capable early career teachers this book offers practical advice encouragement and cutting-edge ideas for today’s English classroom.

Drawing on contemporary and foundational research to infuse classrooms with substance and energy the authors focus on authentic assignments with real-world value. 

Topics in this volume include: 

• Understanding and teaching language change and attention to culture
• Fostering audience-responsive communication
• Addressing today’s challenges for in-person and technology-enabled speaking
• Encouraging and assessing respectful talk and multimedia communication
• Managing heated conversations
• Grasping why deep listening may be a lost art and how we can recover it. 

Packed with classroom-ready approaches provocative ideas encouraging insights as well as the authors’ anecdotes and asides this book will entertain educate and inspire teachers who take seriously the importance of language speaking and listening in today’s dynamic world. 

As an added benefit teachers and scholars from across the country add their voices and experiences in the ideal Teachers’ Lounge providing important and diverse perspectives and advice. The Teachers' Lounge contributors: 

• Sydney Bryan
• Kelly Byrne Bull
• Tricia Ebarvia
• Christian Z. Goering
• Sharonica Nelson
• Molly S. Potas
• Kia Jane Richmond
• Jana L. Rieck
• Martha Sandven
• Brian Stzabnik
• Peter S. Willis

About Continuing the Journey 

Continuing the Journey is a five-book series on advanced approaches to teaching English language arts. Written for veteran teachers by Leila Christenbury and Ken Lindblom the books include “From the Teachers’ Lounge” an innovative feature that honors the expertise of both colleagues from the field and highly regarded scholars. Topics addressed in the series include literature and informational texts; language and writing; listening speaking and presenting; digital literacies; and living the professional life of a veteran teacher.

Named one of the 20 Best New Rhetoric Books to Read in 2021 by BookAuthority

Winner of the 2021 Vision Award from the Coalition for Community Writing 

Humanities scholar Aja Y. Martinez makes a compelling case for counterstory as methodology in rhetoric and writing studies through the well-established framework of critical race theory (CRT) reviewing first the counterstory work of Richard Delgado Derrick Bell and Patricia J. Williams whom she terms counterstory exemplars. Delgado Bell and Williams foundational critical race theorists working in the respective counterstory genres of narrated dialogue fantasy/allegory and autobiography have set precedent for others who would research and compose with this method.

Arguing that counterstory provides opportunities for marginalized voices to contribute to conversations about dominant ideology Martinez applies racial and feminist rhetorical criticism to the rich histories and theories established through counterstory genres all the while demonstrating how CRT theories and methods can inform teaching research and writing/publishing of counterstory.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series

In this series the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric communication education discourse analysis psychology cultural studies and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers to classrooms and communities and curricula to analyses of the social political and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Cross-Talk in Comp Theory is a collection of pivotal texts that mark the rebirth of a field composition studies beginning with the rise of the process movement. It has been thrice revised to account for shortfalls and changing conversations. The second edition paid increased attention to the significance of gender the rise in voices of people of color and the move toward technology. The third edition deepened the conversation on technology and multimodal composing while keeping most of what had been successful in prior editions of the collection.

In this latest edition we recognize that discussions of discourse have become commonplace. Meanwhile issues of social justice—who we teach how we teach and who “we” are—have become much more prescient in our composition classrooms as elsewhere. And as technology evolves so too do our discussions of the role of technology and multimodality in our classrooms.

This important text:

• Maintains the historical perspective of previous editions;
• Provides critical insights into the ever-changing discipline of composition studies; and
• Centers composition scholars and instructors on the challenges and opportunities brought about by changes in today’s students and world.

Whether you’re new to teaching composition or a long-time composition instructor evolving alongside a rapidly changing field requires awareness of where the field has been where it stands and where it’s going to be of sound service to today’s composition students.

Zapata demonstrates how to reinvigorate aesthetic and critical response in early childhood and elementary classrooms through literature explorations of diverse picturebook collections. Drawing on classroom practices she offers approaches and guiding principles that can be tailored to individual contexts through an anti-oppressive lens. Her approach is informed by the ethical work of integrating diverse children’s picturebooks in the classroom a desire to cultivate a critical literature classroom landscape that resists stereotypical representations of people of color in literature and a commitment to recentering critical engagement of diverse picturebooks. Part of the Principles in Practice imprint the book draws on NCTE’s position statement Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature.

Discussion Pathways to Literacy Learning examines the function of classroom discussion as an essential element in inquiry and literacy learning.

McCann Kahn and Walter provide examples of classroom discussion activities that have been part of an ongoing partnership between university professors and high school English teachers. The book draws on their research into the effect of discussion on literacy learning and offers examples of activities and guidelines for activities that teachers can use in their own practice. Beyond demonstrating the strong impact that authentic discussions have on learning the authors show how participation in discussions can be pleasurable and meaningful experiences for adolescents especially when then can choose the focus for their shared inquiry.

This fun and practical book gives teachers of grades 3–5 teachers both the research and the day-to-day practical activities to expand and empower their students’ vocabulary. 

Upper elementary students will develop a deeper understanding of how the English language works enrich their vocabularies and improve their reading and writing skills through the information and lessons provided by veteran educators Mary Jo Fresch and David L. Harrison. 

Each chapter presents definitions and playful examples (in poetry and prose) to teach: 

• Antonyms synonyms acronyms (and many more “nyms”)
• Similes and metaphors
• Common idioms
• Shades of meaning and word origins 

Practical lessons and activities for each category will engage students in joyful practice. A final chapter offers insights into language choices by eight well-known children’s poets and authors including two former US Young People’s Poets Laureate—Kenn Nesbitt and Margarita Engle—and world-renowned Jane Yolen.

Teacher researcher and consultant Amy Benjamin challenges the idea of “skill and drill” grammar in the second edition of this lively engaging and immensely practical guide. 

Does grammar instruction have to elicit moans and groans from students and teachers alike? Only when it’s taught the old-fashioned way: as a series of rules to follow and errors to “fix” that have little or no connection to practical application or real-world writing.

Benjamin’s enlightened view of grammar is grounded in linguistics and teaches us how to make informed decisions about teaching grammar—how to move beyond fixing surface errors to teaching how grammar can be used as the building blocks of sentences to create meaning. By using sentence patterns mapping visuals and manipulatives Benjamin presents an approach to grammar instruction that is suitable for a variety of student populations.

Although she doesn’t advocate for teaching to the test Benjamin acknowledges the pressures students face when taking high-stakes tests such as the SAT and ACT. Included is a chapter on how to improve students’ editing skills to help prepare them for the short-answer portion of these tests.

The authors share classroom vignettes strategies and resources for “going public” with literacy assessment through teacher collaboration with colleagues with families and with the community.

Teachers want assessment tools and strategies that inform instruction engage students in the process and invite families and community members to enter into the conversation about student learning and progress. When teachers work collaboratively with one another they align beliefs and practices to generate new ideas that reflect the questions they are asking about literacy and learning. When students families and the community are invited to be active engaged participants in these discussions all stakeholders have an opportunity to create a shared vision for literacy learning and to construct assessment tools and strategies that help everyone answer the important questions: “How as teachers are we engaging with one another over our literacy assessment beliefs and practices?” and “How can we better bring families and communities into these conversations?” 

In this volume of the Principles in Practice Literacy Assessment strand of books veteran educators Kathryn Mitchell Pierce and Rosario Ordoñez-Jasis share classroom vignettes strategies and resources for “going public” with literacy assessment through teacher collaboration with colleagues with families and with the community. Drawing from the IRA–NCTE Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing Revised Edition and their own extensive experience the authors have compiled a set of collaborative assessment principles as well as a model for teacher professional development around assessment to guide teachers from assessment theory to practical implementation in the classroom. 

Teachers are at the heart of assessment conversations because they have up-close and personal experiences with how assessments impact their students. These experiences provide an invaluable perspective that is essential to all decision making about assessing student learning. But teachers don’t—or shouldn’t—stand alone. Their critical expertise is strengthened by the experiences and expertise of others invested in the success of our students—colleagues families communities and students themselves.

In Growing Writers veteran teacher educator Anne Elrod Whitney explores how the principles defined in NCTE’s Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing position statement can support high school writers and teachers of writing through knowledge and a conscious search for meaning in our writing activities. 

When principles guide our teaching we can better understand our teaching purposes make decisions about approaches and content vet ideas supplied by others and grow as teachers of writing. As part of the Writing in Today’s Classrooms strand of the Principles in Practice imprint the book includes snapshots from high school teachers working in a variety of settings who illustrate how their own principled classroom practices have helped both them and their students to grow whether they are writing for advocacy learning the importance of revision experimenting with new audiences or embracing the vulnerability and the power of writing. 

The principles come alive through the author’s analysis and friendly discussion and the contributing teachers’ everyday practices. Whitney’s compassionate support and encouragement of active ongoing learning is supplemented by further-reading lists and an annotated bibliography of both print and digital texts to accompany us on our journeys to ever-greater effectiveness as writers and teachers of writing.

Even from the earliest grades children have the rights to read and write—not just in dominant American English but also in their own languages and dialects.

Young children make meaning and make sense from the earliest years. They read facial expressions engage in interactions and read symbols across a variety of named languages. Historically narrow definitions of reading and writing however often prevent children of color and immigrants from having access to texts that reflect their diverse cultures and backgrounds. Classroom materials also often don't reflect the growing majority of multilingual children of color compromising their right to access texts that reflect their cultural values language practices and historical legacies.

Promoting equitable inclusive and plural understandings of literacy Mariana Souto-Manning and eight New York City public school teachers explore how elementary teachers can welcome into their classrooms the voices values language practices stories and experiences of their students who have been minoritized by dominant curricula cultivating reading and writing experiences that showcase children's varied skills and rich practices.

Readers are invited to enter classrooms where teachers have engaged with the principles detailed in two NCTE position statements--NCTE Beliefs about the Students' Right to Write and The Students' Right to Read--in the pursuit of justice. Collectively their experiences show that when teachers view the communities their students come from as assets to and in school children not only thrive academically but they also gain confidence in themselves as learners and develop a critical consciousness. Together stepping into their power they seek to right historical and contemporary wrongs as they commit to changing the world.

About Principles in Practice

Books in the Principles in Practice imprint offer teachers concrete illustrations of effective classroom practices based in NCTE research briefs and policy statements.

Each book discusses the research on a specific topic links the research to an NCTE brief or policy statement and then demonstrates how those principles come alive in practice: by showcasing actual classroom practices that demonstrate the policies in action; by talking about research in practical teacher-friendly language; and by offering teachers possibilities for rethinking their own practices in light of the ideas presented in the books.

In Just Theory David Downing offers an alternative history of critical theory in the context of the birth and transformation of the Western philosophical tradition. 

Rather than providing a summary survey it situates the production of theoretical texts within the geopolitical economy of just two pivotal cultural turns: Cultural Turn 1 (roughly 450–350 BCE) looks at the Platonic revolution during which a new philosophic universalist and literate discourse emerged from what had long been an oral culture; Cultural Turn 2 (roughly 1770–1870) investigates the Romantic revolution and its nineteenth-century aftermath up to the Paris Commune. 

While focusing on the quest for social justice Downing situates the two cultural turns within deep time: Cultural Turn 1 gave birth to the Western philosophical tradition during the Holocene; Cultural Turn 2 witnessed the beginnings of the shift to the Anthropocene when the Industrial Revolution and the fossil fuel age began to alter our complex biospheres and geospheres. As described in the epilogue the aftereffects of Western metaphysics have dramatically shaped our twenty-first-century world especially for teachers and scholars in English and the humanities.

From synesthetic poems to questioning poems to the ghazal Lightning Paths: 75 Poetry Writing Exercises has something fun or fascinating for every student and teacher as they explore the possibilities of poetry writing. 

The exercises teach and utilize technique while also focusing on and inspiring the intuitive and imaginative qualities of poetry. Each poem type includes an introduction explaining the exercise’s goal detailed instructions and a student example. The 75 activities are divided into three sections: 

• Exercises that focus on different types of imagery and ways to generate fresh imagery
• Exercises born out of unusual prompts and ideas that engage a writer’s experiences in the real world 
• Exercises related to what form might look like or how it might function 

>Kyle Vaughn invites every writer to explore the power of poetry illuminating the way through the endless possibilities for inspiration.

This book demonstrates how researchers and practitioners in writing and rhetoric studies can engage in story work across differences in culture language locations and experience. Based on an ethnographic study in Nepal spanning a decade Author Katie Silvester speaks with and to the stories of Bhutanese women in diaspora learning English later in life during resettlement and in the context of waves of social change brought on by the end of their asylum. In the process she demonstrates how researchers and practitioners in writing and rhetoric studies might:

• Engage in literacy work across differences in culture language location and experience;
• Reconfigure and reformulate with others how we come to understand the literacy hope and violence in specific migrations; and
• Use the stories that students bring with them to the classroom about their backgrounds to promote literacy learning.

The stories in this book aren’t just powerful; as the world becomes smaller and instructors everywhere find themselves teaching students of increasingly diverse backgrounds this book provides insight for teaching literacies across cultural landscapes. 

An expansive look at the discipline of writing studies with a focus on serving and supporting first-year writing students and instructors at open access institutions.

There is a huge gap between perceptions of the field of writing studies and the material realities of those who teach in it. Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor Scholarship and Teaching argues for the centering of the field’s research and service on first-year writing particularly the “new majority” of college students (who are more diverse than ever before) and those who teach them.

The book features the voices of first-year writing instructors at a two-year open-access multi-campus institution whose students are consistently underrepresented in discussions of the discipline. Drawing from a study of 78 two-year college student writers and an analysis of nearly two decades of issues of the major journals in the field of writing studies Holly Hassel and Cassandra Phillips sketch out a reimagined vision for writing studies that roots the scholarship research and service in the discipline squarely within the changing material realities of contemporary college writing instruction.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series

In this series the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric communication education discourse analysis psychology cultural studies and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers to classrooms and communities and curricula to analyses of the social political and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

The nature and tools of writing have changed. Today’s students compose and read chunks of webtexts and short text messages while they are on the move. If compositionists wish to be pedagogically relevant they need to think more carefully about how their students read and compose texts and where they do so.

More and more young people are choosing to write a variety of texts in a variety of locations because technologies make it possible. As a result educational scholars are developing new understandings of how to incorporate such technologies into the classroom. To that end this book provides practical resources and assignments for writing instructors who are interested in a pedagogy that makes use of mobile technologies. Editor Claire Lutkewitte and her contributors explore both writing for and about mobile technologies and writing with mobile technologies. 

Coming at a time when instructors are pressured to be professionally innovative but are rarely provided ideal circumstances in which to do so this book offers: 

• A starting point for instructors who haven’t yet used mobile technologies in the classroom
• Fresh ideas to those who have and proof that they are not alone
• And a call of reassurance that we can do more with less

In Nonfiction Writers Dig Deep some of today’s most celebrated writers for children share essays that describe a critical part of the informational writing process that is often left out of classroom instruction. 

To craft engaging nonfiction professional writers choose topics that fascinate them and explore concepts and themes that reflect their passions personalities beliefs and experiences in the world. By scrutinizing the information they collect to make their own personal meaning they create distinctive books that delight as well as inform. 

In addition to essays from mentor authors the book includes a wide range of tips tools teaching strategies and activity ideas from editor Melissa Stewart to help students (1) choose a topic (2) focus that topic by identifying a core idea theme or concept and (3) analyze their research to find a personal connection. By adding a piece of themselves to their drafts students will learn to craft rich unique prose. 

Featuring essays by Sarah Albee Chris Barton Donna Janell Bowman Mary Kay Carson Nancy Castaldo Jason Chin Lesa Cline-Ransome Seth Fishman Candace Fleming Kelly Milner Halls Deborah Heiligman Susan Hood Gail Jarrow Lita Judge Jess Keating Barbara Kerley Heather Lang Cynthia Levinson Michelle Markel Carla Killough McClafferty Heather Montgomery Patricia Newman Elizabeth Partridge Baptiste Paul Miranda Paul Teresa Robeson Mara Rockliff Barb Rosenstock Laura Purdie Salas Anita Sanchez April Pulley Sayre Steve Sheinkin Ray Anthony Shepard Anita Silvey Traci Sorell Tanya Lee Stone Jennifer Swanson Stephen R. Swinburne Don Tate Laurie Ann Thompson Pamela Turner Patricia Valdez Sandra Neil Wallace Laurie Wallmark Jennifer Ward Carole Boston Weatherford Lee Wind Paula Yoo and Karen Romano Young.

An insightful and informative guide for many of the situations and issues high school English Language Arts teachers face every day.

From four veteran teacher educators On the Case in the English Language Arts Classroom offers twenty case narratives as well as a format for discussion professional resources that can inform decisions and a guide to constructing new case narratives that can expand the possibilities for developing powerful problem-solving strategies.

Being a high school English teacher is both rewarding and difficult. Although teacher education programs try to be thorough they can’t prepare preservice teachers for every situation that might arise. For instance:

• How can an ELA teacher work with learners who have suffered significant trauma?
• How can a well-prepared literature instructor teach high school students the basics of reading?
• Should a teacher shy away from classroom conversations because they can become “too political”?
• How does a teacher contend with a crushing workload?

On the Case in the English Language Arts Classroom provides teachers at any point in their career the opportunity to analyze potential situations and problems that commonly confront teachers through case studies that prompt extensive stimulating discussion and invite written responses.

In today’s educational climate of one-size-fits-all instruction Planning for Inquiry shows you how to get an inquiry-based curriculum started how to keep it going and how to do so while remaining accountable to mandated curricula standards and programs. Diane Parker invites you into her classroom to think along with her as she provides an up-close look at the underlying structure of an inquiry-based approach what such an approach might look like in practice and how you can make it happen in your own classroom. Supported by a wealth of stories and examples Parker shares a practical yet nonprescriptive framework for developing curriculum from learners' questions and authentic classroom events. You will be able to adapt this framework for both short- and long-term planning with your own students. Planning for Inquiry offers valuable information and much-needed moral support to those of us who believe that there is more to teaching than following a script and that teachers not programs make a difference in the lives of children.

Queer Techné offers an intimate portrait of the practices embodied knowledge desires and friendships that animate the technical innovation of early digital computing. This book explores archival materials from the Manchester University National Archive for the History of Computing the site of some of the earliest digital computers and the first commercial computer. The book first analyzes in depth the technical and scientific writing of Alan Turing who is often credited as an early inventor of computers. Then recognizing that no inventor works alone the book places Turing’s work in context first in the network of queer friends who collaborated with Turing and then within a community of women whose labor forms the foundation of computing operations. As such this project argues for the importance of embodied experiences gender and sexuality as central lenses for understanding technical communication as well as technical innovation.

Studying Shakespeare in the high school classroom can and sometimes should begin with images and film. In Reading Shakespeare Film First Mary Ellen Dakin asserts that we need to read Shakespeare in triplicate—as the stuff of transformative literature theater and film. 

The potential for the mutual reinforcement and transfer of twenty-first-century literacy skills between text and film is too promising for classroom teachers to overlook. The heart of this book is a triangle whose three points are literary theatrical and cinematic; the chapters map a route around the perimeter of the triangle guiding teachers and students with carefully researched and classroom-tested strategies for crossing over from Shakespeare’s rich and strange early modern English to equally rich and strange modern film and illustrated productions of his plays. 

Along the way readers engage in reading and analyzing film stills movie posters and book covers; recognizing the three faces of film: literary theatrical and cinematic; exploring in depth the theatrical and cinematic elements of Shakespeare and then reconnecting them to the text; reading Shakespeare in full-length films; and transmediating Shakespeare's scripts into theater and film. As the “old” language of Shakespeare is constantly renewed through the “new” language of film students develop twenty-first-century literacy skills through a marriage of the two.

Reframing the Relational examines how writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines communicate with each other in face-to-face conversations about teaching writing. 

Sandra L. Tarabochia argues that a pedagogical approach to faculty interactions in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) contexts can enhance cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration and ultimately lead to more productive sustainable initiatives. Theorizing pedagogy as an epistemic reflexive relational activity among teacher-learners she uses a pedagogical framework to analyze conversations between writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines drawing on transcripts from interviews and recorded conversations. 

The author identifies the discursive moves faculty used to navigate three communicative challenges or opportunities: negotiating expertise orienting to change and embracing play. Based on this analysis she constructs a pedagogical ethic for WAC/WID work and shows how it can help faculty embrace the potential of cross-disciplinary communication.

The authors show how English teachers can think and plan using a restorative justice lens to address issues of student disconnection and alienation; adult and youth well-being in schools; and inequity and racial justice through writing reading speaking and action.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/><br/>How do teachers educate responsibly in an age of mass incarceration? And why should English teachers in particular concern themselves with unequal treatment and opportunity and the school-to-prison pipeline? The authors—teacher educators and a restorative justice practitioner—address these and other critical questions examining the intersection of restorative justice (RJ) and education with a focus on RJ processes that promote inclusivity and ownership. This book is a beginning guide for ELA teachers to address harm and inequities in the classroom school community and nation. Viewing adolescent literacy as outlined in Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief through the lens of restorative justice will help teachers recognize just how integral practicing empathy and justice is to developing adolescent literacy. The authors provide concrete specific examples of how ELA teachers can think and plan curriculum using an RJ lens to address issues of student disconnection and alienation adult and youth well-being in schools and inequity and racial justice through writing reading speaking and action.

Rethinking Reading in College argues for more systematic attention to the role of reading comprehension in college as a necessary step in addressing the inequities in student achievement that otherwise increase over time.

Synthesizing theory from literacy scholars with strategies derived from classroom inquiry projects and through a critique of the philosophy behind the Common Core State Standards Arlene Fish Wilner examines the needs of college-bound high school students and interrogates the nature of “remediation” in college. Arguing that when supported by rhetorical-reading assignments students in all first-year writing classes can and should explore complex and enduring texts. 

Addressing both composition and reading across the curriculum Wilner demonstrates how faculty in all disciplines and at all curricular levels can improve student outcomes by first deliberately inhabiting the persona of novices rethinking their assumptions about what students know and can do as apprentices in a field.

She also illustrates the limitations of the literary vs. nonliterary text binary through a study of the demands posed by To Kill a Mockingbird a novel commonly taught in both high school and college. An outline for a two-semester first-year general education course and examples of writing-to-read assignments from a range of disciplines are adaptable across subject areas and institutions.

Winner of the 2016 IWCA Outstanding Book/Major Work Award

Drawing from her decade leading Salt Lake Community College’s Community Writing Center (CWC) Tiffany Rousculp advocates cultivating relationships within a “rhetoric of respect” that recognizes the abilities contributions and goals of all participants. Rousculp calls for understanding change not as a result or outcome but as the potential for people to make choices regarding textual production within regulating environments. The book’s dynamic movement through stories of failure success misunderstanding and discovery is characteristic of the way in which academic–community relationships in transition pivot between disruption and sustainability. 

By inquiring into the CWC’s history evolution internal dynamics relationships with stakeholders and interplay between power and resistance Rousculp situates the CWC not as an anomaly in composition studies but as a pointer to where change can happen and what is possible in academic–community writing partnerships when uncertainty persistence and respect converge.

This collection explores decolonial shifts in composition and rhetoric informed by strategies for potentially decolonizing language and literacy practices writing and rhetorical instruction and research practices and methods.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/><br/>The discipline of composition and rhetoric stands at a crossroad in its pedagogical research and public commitments. Decolonial ruptures in writing and rhetoric studies work to build new horizons new histories of local knowledges and meaning-making practices that break from Western hegemonic models of knowledge production. This collection functions as one access point within a constellation of such work forming an ecology of decolonial shifts informed by strategies for potentially decolonizing language and literacy practices writing and rhetorical instruction and research practices and methods. Rhetorics elsewhere and otherwise emerge across a spectrum from geo- and body politics of knowledge and understanding to local histories emerging from colonial peripheries. Romeo García and Damián Baca offer the expressions elsewhere and otherwise as invitations to join existing networks and envision pluriversal ways of thinking writing and teaching that surpass the field’s Eurocentric geographies cartographies and chronologies.

Salt of the Earth is an autoethnography and cultural rhetorics case study that examines white supremacy in the author’s hometown of Grand Saline Texas a community long marred by its racist culture. 

James Chase Sanchez investigates the rhetoric of white supremacy by exploring three unique rhetorical processes―identity construction storytelling and silencing―as they relate to an umbrella act: the rhetoric of preservation. 

Sanchez argues that we need to better understand the productions of white supremacy as a complex rhetorical act and that in order to create a more well-rounded view of cultural rhetorics as a subfield we need more analyses of the way cultures of the oppressor survive and thrive. 

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series:

In this series the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric communication education discourse analysis psychology cultural studies and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers to classrooms and communities and curricula to analyses of the social political and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Are you ready to revolutionize the way you teach literacy skills? Then it’s time to unleash the power of sound in your English language arts classroom! Authors Hashem and Mooney make the case for why the mode of sound is worth your time and effort. 

Discover how to harness the transformative potential of audio by diving into the tools theories and materials you need to bring audio into your classroom. 

Why Sound Matters 

• Engage Students: Sound can powerfully engage students who are auditory learners and help those who are not develop their auditory processing skills.
• Empower Voices: Students can find their unique voices by listening to a diversity of voices across different sound genres.
• Enhance Literacy Skills: In a modern multimodal world students must learn to extract meaning not only from written and visual text but from audio content as well. 

What’s Inside

• Research-Backed Guidance: Learn the theory and science behind the power of sound in education.
• Practical Advice: Get actionable tips for designing assignments that utilize sound effectively.
• Classroom-Ready Materials: Access ready-to-use materials for a variety of sound text genres such as speeches podcasts audio dramas sound poetry and audio memoirs all conveniently included via QR codes. 

Providing everything you need to explore this innovative and relevant way to enrich students’ learning experience this book is your ultimate guide to integrating sound into your ELA classroom!

Edited by Tom Liam Lynch this collection of essays drawn from NCTE’s many journals provides an excellent starting point for teachers who want to bring critical media literacy into their K-12 and college classrooms.

Critical media literacy is not a single star burning brightly in the night sky. It is more like a constellation a collection of stars that tell a story about how educators engage with young people through an array of communicative modes in the spirit of inquiry society and action. 

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. 

This first volume of Special Issues: Trauma-Informed Teaching gathers some of the most compelling and practical recent articles across NCTE journals addressing the importance of trauma-informed teaching and its recent developments in the field.

We live in a time that requires attention to trauma. Educators and students are learning how to move forward in this precarious time which in many ways has amplified preexisting health racial economic and educational inequalities. The pandemic has shaped us in ways we have yet to understand fully but we know we must adapt and heal together. It is imperative that K-College educators not only consider trauma-informed teaching but also healing-centered teaching practices. As we think through ways to support the most harmed people in our teaching and learning communities we will move closer to a more equitable and just healing-centered profession.

Editor Sakeena Everett has curated this collection to show how to help K-College teachers integrate the most up-to-date approaches to trauma-informed teaching into their classroom environments. In this volume you will find valuable insights diverse perspectives innovative and exciting pedagogies as well as thought-provoking research methodologies that engage micro- and macro-level supports you need to get started today.

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.

This volume questions what constitutes literacy in a society organized by race as an inquiry to deepen the significance for why K–20 learners must develop knowledges that support their abilities to process and ultimately transform racism. With this collection of original essays editor Ayanna F. Brown helps to push the field of racial literacy into new directions to avoid niceties and other pitfalls to get to the heart of racial understanding to better respond to the needs of our students and society. This volume brings forth emerging scholars who seek to respond to the sociopolitical and sociohistorical aspects of racial literacy as it relates to youth. The scholarship grapples with how educators at every level think through racial literacy in their work and within their experiences. Each contribution adds depth to the question of agency and illuminates why racial literacy work extends social justice efforts to become a call for a culture of teaching and learning that recenters liberation as an active pursuit.

Winner of the 2021 Association for Writing Across the Curriculum/WAC Clearinghouse award for Best WAC Monograph

A 2008 survey of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs found that nearly half of those identified in a 1987 survey no longer existed twenty years later pointing to a need for an approach to WAC administration that leads to programs that persist over time. In Sustainable WAC current or former WAC program directors Michelle Cox Jeffrey R. Galin and Dan Melzer introduce a theoretical framework for WAC program development that takes into account the diverse contexts of today's institutions of higher education aids WAC program directors in thinking strategically as they develop programs and integrates a focus on program sustainability. 

Informed by theories that illuminate transformative change within systems—complexity systems social network resilience and sustainable development theories—and illustrated with vignettes by WAC directors across the country this book lays out principles strategies and tactics to help WAC program directors launch relaunch or reinvigorate programs within the complicated systems of today’s colleges and universities. Acknowledging that every WAC program grows out of a specific institutional context and grassroots movement this book is a must-read for everyone currently involved in a WAC program or interested in exploring the possibility of one at their college or university.

Recipient of the 2025 Divergent Award for Excellence in Literacy in a Digital Age Research Publication

Teaching Literacy Online (TLO) is a practical guide for secondary and college teachers of English in digital and online environments. Like other practical “how to teach online” books TLO includes an overview of good practices and guidelines for teaching in digital environments and provides detailed suggestions and samples. The suggestions portion of the book focuses on applying the online teaching guidelines to literacy educators who are concerned about teaching literacies through

• digital organization;

• engagement with materials;

• analysis and synthesis of information; and

• the production of texts in a multitude of media and modalities.

By focusing on the engagement analysis and production of texts TLO puts literacy pedagogy as the driving force when making decisions about how to teach online and/or with various digital applications.

Through myriad classroom vignettes experienced educators David Hornsby and Lorraine Wilson show just how phonics is taught and learned in literacy-rich classrooms.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/><br/>Teaching Phonics in Context debunks the myth that whole language teachers do not teach phonics. Through myriad classroom vignettes experienced educators David Hornsby and Lorraine Wilson show just how phonics is taught and learned in literacy-rich classrooms. Although there is a need for the explicit teaching of phonics the authors believe the reading and writing of connected text takes priority; the teaching and learning of phonics is always contained within and subordinate to genuine literacy events; and children spend much more time reading and writing (in which they learn to apply their phonic knowledge) than they do in the actual study of sound-letter relationships. The authors describe classrooms that shimmer and shine with stories read-alouds writing science language play singing rhyme poetry role-play and laughter. Samples of young children’s writing are discussed showing what the young child knows about writing and what the teacher might teach. Ideas are shared for reading interpreting and enjoying picture books as well as which specific sound-letter relationships might be studied as a result of interacting and engaging with particular titles. One of the chapters details ways of working with rhymes which engage children in listening to and identifying rhyming words identifying individual sounds and discovering sound-letter patterns. The authors outline the professional knowledge necessary for teachers to be able to make informed independent decisions about teaching phonics in the context of authentic literacy events. Valuable advice also is offered to teachers who have ELL students in their classrooms.

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

Providing myriad examples of student work and explicit teaching in classrooms 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. This book colorfully illustrates how to teach students toward agency autonomy and accountability in their reader response notebooks.

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.

Moving outside of classroom-based and English-dominant contexts Rachel Bloom-Pojar draws from an ethnographic study of a summer health program in the Dominican Republic to examine what exactly rhetorical translanguaging might look like arguing for a rhetorical approach that accounts for stigma race and institutional constraints. Within a context where the variety of Spanish spoken by the local community is stigmatized Bloom-Pojar examines how raciolinguistic ideologies inform notions of stigma in this region of the Dominican Republic and then demonstrates how participants and patients in this study “flip the script” to view “professional” or formal Spanish as language in need of translation privileging patients’ discourses of Spanish and health. This framework for the rhetoric of translanguaging (1) complicates language ideologies to challenge linguistic inequality; (2) cultivates translation spaces across modes languages and discourses; (3) draws from collective resources through relationship building; and (4) critically reinvents discourse between institutions and communities. Ultimately the study emphasizes how a focus on collective linguistic resources can enhance translanguaging practices between institutional and community contexts. The ILP offers both the freedom and the structure to guide students to success. Yes letting go can be scary—but the results speak for themselves.

In Using Film to Unlock Textual Literacy: A Teacher’s Guide Robert Bryant Crisp explores strategies for using film study and filmmaking to help students engage in entirely new ways with both print and digital texts. 

Struggling to help students engage with print texts? 

Looking for ways to help them learn to analyze texts deeply in a hands-on differentiated and real-world environment? 

High school teacher Robert Bryant Crisp explores how film can be read in much the same way as print texts—and can be every bit as rewarding. We are surrounded by screens and we understand film viscerally. It’s a language we all comprehend from which we can make meaning even when we may not understand the technical aspects of how that process happens. And telling stories via the medium of film requires every bit of the forethought and intent that constructing print text requires. 

From basic team building storyboarding and filming-with-your-phone-camera activities to deeper dives into adapting texts making directorial choices and guiding audience response through texts Crisp proves that you can teach film study even without specialized training. 

Texts incorporated into lessons include: “Casey at the Bat” 42 E. T. “Everyday Use” Othello Edward Scissorhands “The Cremation of Sam McGee” Unbroken and more. Resources include a list of film vocabulary observation charts and rubrics storyboard templates and sample film technique assessments.

A friendly and practical guide for teaching English grammar in the context of real lived language.

As most teachers of English now know research shows that teaching grammar in the traditional way—through worksheets memorizing definitions and diagramming sentences—doesn’t work and that teaching grammar in the context of reading and writing is a better approach.

People who understand language can make things happen. That is the point of grammar/language teaching. Not definitions. Not terminology. Language.

Veteran teacher educator Deborah Dean addresses the realities and challenges of grammar instruction with practical examples and experiences including:

• Vignettes of classroom conversations to show what teaching in context can look like in action
• Classroom practices to help teachers try out the ideas with their own students 
• Issues such as helping English language learners and native speakers navigate formal academic English especially in the context of testing

Dean’s straightforward approach uncomplicates the task of teaching grammar in context allowing her—and us—to share the excitement and wonder to be found in the study of language.