English Journal - Volume 106, Issue 2, 2016

Members of the Secondary Section Steering Committee comment on topics of importance to English language arts educators.

Using language from a department meeting, this article shares how a veteran high school English teacher closed her classroom door when faced with a mandate from the district.

Through engagement with critical literacies and multiliteracies, an urban classroom becomes a space of agency and resistance for students and teacher alike.

In this piece, a practicing teacher discusses an institutional and collegial experience as she attempts to implement an innovative, research-based curricular model for literacy education.

Two district literacy leaders share their experience designing a dialogic model ofprofessional development for literacy teachers that advocates for open-door teaching.

This article respectfully challenges the metaphor of “open doors as resistance” by reconceptualizing power in the English classroom.

Drawing from autoethnography, the authors examine a Muslim teacher’s experiences as she encounters several closed doors in her journey to become an educator.

Drawing on the work of Denstaedt, Roop, and Best (NCTE), the authors devise and coteach an interdisciplinary unit based on proslavery and abolitionist primary documents to guide students in doing history and doing writing.

The most common forms of teacher professional development are ineffective and lead to low teacher satisfaction. A critique protocol offers an alternative that intellectually engages teachers and fosters meaningful collaboration at different career stages.

This article uses data from a year-long ethnographic study to paint a portrait of one Chicana veteran teacher who enacts an activist pedagogy in the secondary English language arts classroom.

Julie and David Gorlewski introduce this special section in which four experienced English language arts teachers discuss and debate the controversies involved with teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The author reviews controversies surrounding the teaching of Huck Finn in the context of racial turmoil in the United States, then presents a revised text that substitutes a misogynist term, c***, for n*****, and makes the character Jim a female, Kim, asking readers to consider the need for empathy in reading.

The author intersectionally examines the arguments around the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as evidence of the curricular centrality of whiteness. She calls for educators to attend the material purposes of oppression.

In this commentary, the author explores the underlying conflicts related to whether Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should be part of the high school literary canon.

The author encourages educators and researchers to foreground the voices and experiences of youth and youth culture in discussions about power and privilege in canonical and contemporary texts.