English Journal - Volume 107, Issue 1, 2017

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

The authors identify the necessity of focusing on and pluralizing understandings of transgender youth. They describe a series of classroom activities conducted to engage preservice English teachers.

This article examines the role of implicit bias in adolescents’ reading lives, first through an examination of how implicit bias affects the literature young readers encounter and then through practical strategies aimed at helping adolescents and teachers confront their own biases.

This article explores multivoiced young adult texts that feature characters who decide to intentionally deny or silence their identities. It includes three classroom units with advocacy projects.

Using example lesson ideas and language choices, the authors introduce Launching Lessons, a method for engaging the challenging conversations multicultural YA texts elicit in school settings.

This article shares an analysis of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, American Born Chinese, and Mexican WhiteBoy used to introduce students to postcolonialism.

The authors propose non-prose narratives—specifically verse novels and comics as texts with great potential to incorporate diversity into the classroom.

The format and content of LGBTQ graphic novels make them effective pedagogical tools for engaging students in critical discussions about gender and sexuality. By using two exemplar texts, the authors offer teachers a vocabulary and method for engaging in these conversations.

This article forwards an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that knits together knowledge from literacy, education, and neuroscience to more fully understand the learning opportunities that global literary narratives make available to learners.

Moon at Nine is Deborah Ellis’s lyrical and moving young adult novel about two young women growing up in post-Shah Iran, where the strict Islamic laws regard homosexuality as punishable by death. Farrin and Sadira’s love story offers a powerful vehicle for teachers to broaden multicultural perspectives.

Cover illustrations for this weekly magazine provide opportunities to engage students and meet standards for visual literacy.

“Continuous Becoming: Moving toward Mastery” offers suggestions, ideas, and experiences to help novice and veteran teachers discover their own road maps toward mastery.

This column serves 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.