NCTE

Ted Kesler, with a community of grade school teachers and students, demonstrates how students’ creative responses lead to deep comprehension of diverse texts and ultimately help them to develop their literate identities.

The Reader Response Notebook (RRN) is a tried-and-true tool in elementary and middle school classrooms. However, teachers and students often express frustration with this tool. Responses can read as though students are just going through the motions, with little evidence of deep comprehension. With this book, teacher educator and consultant Ted Kesler breathes new life into the RRN by infusing this work with three key practices: 

• Encouraging responses to reflect design work, using a variety of writing tools
• Expanding what counts as text, including popular culture texts that are important in students’ lives outside of school
• And making the RRN an integral part of a community of practice

Studying Shakespeare in the high school classroom can and sometimes should begin with images and film. In Reading Shakespeare Film First, Mary Ellen Dakin asserts that we need to read Shakespeare in triplicate—as the stuff of transformative literature, theater, and film. 

The potential for the mutual reinforcement and transfer of twenty-first-century literacy skills between text and film is too promising for classroom teachers to overlook. The heart of this book is a triangle whose three points are literary, theatrical, and cinematic; the chapters map a route around the perimeter of the triangle, guiding teachers and students with carefully researched and classroom-tested strategies for crossing over from Shakespeare’s rich and strange early modern English to equally rich and strange modern film and illustrated productions of his plays. 

Along the way, readers engage in reading and analyzing film stills, movie posters, and book covers; recognizing the three faces of film: literary, theatrical, and cinematic; exploring in depth the theatrical and cinematic elements of Shakespeare and then reconnecting them to the text; reading Shakespeare in full-length films; and transmediating Shakespeare's scripts into theater and film. As the “old” language of Shakespeare is constantly renewed through the “new” language of film, students develop twenty-first-century literacy skills through a marriage of the two.

Reframing the Relational examines how writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines communicate with each other in face-to-face conversations about teaching writing. 

Sandra L. Tarabochia argues that a pedagogical approach to faculty interactions in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) contexts can enhance cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration and ultimately lead to more productive, sustainable initiatives. Theorizing pedagogy as an epistemic, reflexive, relational activity among teacher-learners, she uses a pedagogical framework to analyze conversations between writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines, drawing on transcripts from interviews and recorded conversations. 

The author identifies the discursive moves faculty used to navigate three communicative challenges or opportunities: negotiating expertise, orienting to change, and embracing play. Based on this analysis, she constructs a pedagogical ethic for WAC/WID work and shows how it can help faculty embrace the potential of cross-disciplinary communication.

Building upon the 2018 Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature position statement, Restorying Young Adult Literature spotlights how both teachers and students are using digital tools and technologies to re-read, re-write, and restory YAL today. 

Primarily, this text provides pedagogical approaches and resources for English language arts (ELA) educators to integrate shifts in textuality and the availability of participatory digital networks into their classroom. We propose Digital YAL and Digital YA Culture as conceptual tools for teachers to learn from the digital restorying practices of young people and fellow educators, and across the book, we demonstrate how teachers can restory text selection, digital access, white curricula, and multimodality in their classroom, doing so in pursuit of more just teaching and learning for today’s digital era.

At the heart of Rethinking the “Adolescent” in Adolescent Literacy is a call to English language arts teachers to examine the very assumptions of adolescence they may be operating from in order to reimagine new possibilities for engaging students with the English curriculum. 

Relying on a sociocultural view of adolescence established by scholars in critical youth studies, the book focuses on classrooms from diverse contexts to explain adolescence as a construct and how this perspective of youth can encourage educators to re-envision literacy instruction and learning. Working from and looking beyond Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief, the authors explore the “myth” of adolescence and the possibility of a curriculum that positions youth as experts and knowledgeable advocates fully engaged in their own learning.

Rhetorical Ecologies invites you on a transformative journey through the history of writing and rhetoric studies’ adoption of ecology, situating this history in rich discussions about: 

• the potential that ecology holds for rhetoric and writing studies; 
• the untapped potential of ecology in fostering inclusive, equitable, and justice-oriented approaches to rhetorical inquiry; and  
• the diverse and dynamic nature of rhetoric ecologies.  

Rhetorics of Overcoming addresses the in/accessibility of writing classroom and writing center practices for disabled and nondisabled student writers, exploring how rhetorics of overcoming—the idea that disabled students must overcome their disabilities in order to be successful—manifest in writing studies scholarship and practices.

Allison Harper Hitt argues that rewriting rhetorics of overcoming as narratives of “coming over” is one way to overcome ableist pedagogical standards. Whereas rhetorics of overcoming rely on medical-model processes of diagnosis, disclosure, cure, and overcoming for individual students, coming over involves valuing disability and difference and challenging systemic issues of physical and pedagogical inaccessibility. 

Hitt calls for developing understandings of disability and difference that move beyond accommodation models in which students are diagnosed and remediated, instead working collaboratively—with instructors, administrators, consultants, and students themselves—to craft multimodal, universally designed writing pedagogies that meet students’ access needs.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series:

In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.