Language Arts - Volume 97, Issue 4, 2020

Through a social justice lens, I examine research on reading and response, both spontaneous and facilitated, to LGBTQ-inclusive children’s literature in elementary school settings.

This column looks at ways literary life histories invite students to interpret texts from experiential, cultural, social, and other stances and positionalities.

Informed by theories of reading as transactions and new literacies, the authors discuss the powerful possibilities of reconsidering reader response with contemporary nonfiction children’s literature.

Understanding how emotion circulates in classrooms and what emotion does to signs is central to teachers and researchers of critical literacy and literary response.