English Journal - Volume 104, Issue 3, 2015

In this framing article, the guest editors provide the theoretical framework for conceptualizing adolescence and adolescents driving this special issue of English—Journal. They also describe what they call a youth lens, an approach for reading and analyzing young adult literature that honors the idea of adolescence as a—construct.

“Speaking My Mind” invites readers to speak out about controversial issues relevant to the teaching of English language arts.

This piece looks at how banned books can offer an illuminating glimpse into social constructions of “healthy” and “normal” adolescent development. Unease with—certain materials and topics in the secondary classroom can offer productive points of inquiry for both teachers and students.

This article describes activities and assignments for using a youth lens to critique dominant images of adolescents/ce in young adult literature and pop culture—texts.

In this article, ELA and urban teacher educators who have been long-time advocates for and users of young adult literature in their work with beginning English—teachers re-think the cultural constructs of “black and brown” adolescence that undergird the genre and guide their work.

An incident of bullying via Twitter in a Midwestern US high school problematizes traditional stereotypes about adolescents and social media, as witnessed by two—English teachers at the school who write about their own experiences and implications for English curriculum and instruction.

Grounded in the three-part literary concept of the narrator, the narratee, and the implied reader, this article provides teachers and students with a heuristic for—uncovering, attending to, and critiquing assumptions about youth found in the first-person narrative form that predominates in young adult literature.

This article details the authors’ success in using youth as a construct to facilitate literary analysis skills among high school students who claimed not to like reading—and who demonstrated difficulty with reading comprehension. The authors provide descriptions of the analysis activities in which the students participated.

In this article, the author is concerned with the ways conceptions of adolescence and sexuality take hold in and beyond the English curriculum. Through a—classroom vignette, she considers some of the ways teachers might make more of moments when sex comes up and when planning interactions about sex with—youth.

This article describes a class in which media literacy was used as a means for student inquiry into cultural constructedness of adolescents. Students read and—critiqued media portrayals of teenagers, then used digital video to re-construct their own complex re-presentations of their adolescent selves.

Two high school teachers examine classroom moments that position youth as cosmopolitan intellectuals and invested community members as opposed to—disengaged and disaffected adolescents.

This column seeks to explore the experiences of National Writing Project teachers as writers, teachers of writing, and educational leaders.

This column hopes to serve as a space dedicated to conversation about Young Adult Literature and to celebrate adolescents, their reading, and their experiences—by reviewing the texts that engage them.

“Soft(a)ware in the English Classroom” seeks to identify the ways in which our teaching and learning lives are influenced by software.—