English Education - Volume 33, Issue 4, 2001

What does learning mean in the technological age? While today’s student has easily adapted to technological advancement and while these advancements offer great potential for students and teachers, Emig argues that embodied learning, interactions that take place within authentic communities of inquiry with physical others, is still at the heart of true learning. The embodied classroom, says Emig, is the last site for socialization in this society. She charges the reader to consider the complex and reciprocal relationships between teacher and students in the classroom.

As a recipient of the Janet Emig Award for his 1972 article, “Student Authority,’ Small reflects on his first article and revisits the concept as it applies to today’s classroom. He notes that the themese raised in the 1972 piece are still applicable today. The role of the English teacher, Small says, is to help students build on and expand the authority with language that they begin to develop almost from birth. Today’s students have an even greater authority with language due to advances in technology and the explosion of media.

DeStigter argues for an approach to teaching that transcends traditional student-teacher relationships while maintaining the presense of content knowledge and pedagogy. Culturally-informed pedagogical practices must be supplemented with the awareness of some of the likely cultural characteristics of students as well as an understanding that each student is an individual. This awareness is integrally tied to caring. Take the time, Destigter suggests, to learn as much as possible about the identities and communities of your students in order to respond with culturally sensitive classroom environments and instructional practices.

Tendero reviews three books that have helped him to make sense of the “messy” complexities of students’ literate lives. They are: Things Get Hectic: Teens Write about the Violence That Surrounds Them (Touchstone Books, 1998); Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1999); and Reconceptualizing the Literacies in Adolescents’ Lives (Erlbaum, 1998).

The Conference on English Education Commission of the Study and Teaching of Young Adult Literature (1999) struggles to define young adult literature in order to help English education instructors achieve NCTE/NCATE approval.