English Journal - Volume 115, Issue 3, 2026

This essay examines how anti-fatness manifests in literacy classrooms and argues that culturally relevant pedagogy must expand to include body-inclusive teaching practices that affirm students of all sizes.

The English Journal editors invited this article’s authors to reflect on important facts and strategies for teachers and community members to know and enact as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents continue to infringe on the civil and constitutional rights of immigrant and racialized communities.

This article examines how integrating writing-to-learn strategies with outdoor, nature-based experiences simultaneously strengthens students’ literacy skills and deepens curiosity, reflection, and environmental awareness across varied educational contexts.

Four classroom teachers explain how they addressed the absence of student engagement in state standards and improved their classroom practices by recentering ideas from Louise Rosenblatt’s 1938 book Literature as Exploration.

A teacher educator and former high school English teacher calls for boldly teaching personal narrative in dangerous times, aiming to center youth writing as an authentic activity that highlights vital perspectives on sociopolitical turmoil to drive change.

This article presents a mediation framework—perceiving, assessing, and restorying queerness—to aid teachers in fostering empathy and affirming LGBTQIA+ lives.

The authors share strategies to support teachers in leveraging youths’ critical participatory literacies, informed by African cultural and heritage knowledge, as well as their own experiences as former middle and high school English language arts teachers.

This article introduces platform fallacies, persuasive design logics embedded in digital platforms, and illustrates how classroom activities using these fallacies can extend critical literacy into students’ digital lives.

This article explores strategies for educators to encourage codemeshing in the classroom, focusing on the importance of valuing Black language.

AI chatbots can serve as valuable writing partners by aiding students in brainstorming, organization, revision, and feedback, but their use must be intentional and guided in order to enhance learning rather than replace important steps in the writing process.

This column describes an inquiry-driven English language arts/STEM unit that centers Black joy and futures by inviting students to imagine beyond anti-Black narratives—culminating in a space where Black youth can dream, create, and thrive.

This article demonstrates how teaching Red Jacket’s 1805 “Reply to the Missionary Jacob Cram” in dialogue with canonical and marginalized texts helps students recognize Native American writers as sophisticated, intellectual participants in early American political discourse, rather than isolated cultural voices.

Drawing on personal experiences, the author expresses the importance of LGBTQIA+ teachers in students’ lives.

This column examines how the writing workshop model can counter AI shortcuts by shifting educators from stances of fear and detection to one of intentional design, protecting student voice and inviting generative AI only as a rubric-aligned thought partner that deepens reflection rather than replacing it.

New York State English Council member Henry “Cody” Miller, with column editor Ann David, offers insight into how NYSEC successfully advocated for a Right to Read bill in New York and offers additional resources for similar kinds of advocacy at the state and local levels.