NCTE
NCTE is where literacy educators find their professional home.1 - 20 of 120 results
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Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading
More LessReading is interpreting; interpreting is reading, which is why it’s more crucial than ever to ensure that our students are able to make meaning as they read. But do we know how to integrate best practices in reading instruction into our classrooms? In Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading: Lessons for Teachers of Literature, Deborah Appleman dismantles the traditional divide between secondary teachers of literature and teachers of reading and offers a variety of practical ways to teach reading within the context of literature classrooms. As part of NCTE’s Principles in Practice imprint, the book draws on research-based understandings emerging from Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief, woven together with practical lessons that will enrich the reading experiences of all students. Using real-world examples from diverse secondary classrooms, Appleman helps literature teachers find answers to the questions they have about teaching reading: How can I help students negotiate the complex texts that they will encounter both in and out of the classroom? What are the best ways to engage whole classes in a variety of texts, both literary and nonliterary? What does it mean to be a struggling reader and how can I support these students? How can I inspire and motivate the male readers in my classes?
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Adventurous Thinking
Fostering Students' Rights to Read and Write in Secondary ELA Classrooms
More LessGrounded in NCTE’s position statements “The Students’ Right to Read” and “NCTE Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write,” this book focuses on high school English language arts classes, drawing from the work of seven teachers from across the country to illustrate how advocating for students’ rights to read and write can be revolutionary work.
Drawing from the work of high school teachers across the country, Adventurous Thinking illustrates how advocating for students’ rights to read and write can be revolutionary work. Ours is a conflicted time: the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, for instance, run parallel with increasingly hostile attitudes toward immigrants and prescriptive K–12 curricula, including calls to censor texts. Teachers who fight to give their students the tools and opportunities to read about and write on topics of their choice and express ideas that may be controversial are, in editor Mollie V. Blackburn’s words, “revolutionary artists, and their teaching is revolutionary art.” The teacher chapters focus on high school English language arts classes that engaged with topics such as immigration, linguistic diversity, religious diversity, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, interrogating privilege, LGBTQ people, and people with physical disabilities and mental illness. Following these accounts is an interview with Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give, and an essay by Millie Davis, former director of NCTE’s Intellectual Freedom Center. The closing essay reflects on provocative curriculum and pedagogy, criticality, community, and connections, as they get taken up in the book and might get taken up in the classrooms of readers. The book is grounded in foundational principles from NCTE’s position statements The Students’ Right to Read and NCTE Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write that underlie these contributors’ practices, principles that add up to one committed declaration: Literacy is every student’s right.
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After Pedagogy
The Experience of Teaching
More LessWhat does it mean to teach after pedagogy? For a long time, composition’s pedagogical conversation has been defined by its theoretical disagreements.
Is learning a cognitive process or a social one? Is the self expressed or distributed? Can writing be understood as a process, or is any process too messy to be understood? These debates have finally run out of steam, argues Paul Lynch, leaving composition in a “postpedagogical” moment, a moment when the field no longer believes that pedagogical theories can account for the complexities of teaching. After Pedagogy extends the postpedagogical conversation by turning to the experience of teaching itself.
Though the work of John Dewey, After Pedagogy argues that experience offers an arena in which theory and practice can coexist. Most important, experience can fashion the teachable moments of postpedagogical practice into resources for further growth. “We cannot know what precisely the student will do with what we have offered, but we can think with the student about the experience of the offer itself.” By turning what students and teachers know about writing into an area of intellectual inquiry, a philosophy of experience can make teaching sustainable after pedagogy.
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Already Readers and Writers
Honoring Students' Rights to Read and Write in the Middle Grade Classroom
More LessAlready Readers and Writers: Honoring Students' Rights to Read and Write in the Middle Grade Classroom is meant to help all middle school educators encourage their students to build literate lives both within the classroom and well beyond it.
Veteran middle school teacher Jennifer Ochoa has brought together middle school teachers and teacher leaders, children’s author and We Need Diverse Books cofounder Ellen Oh, children’s literature scholar Kristin McIlhagga, reading and writing workshop teacher-author Linda Rief, and censorship expert Millie Davis to examine current middle school literacy practices that support students’ rights to read and write.
By showcasing their experiences and activities, and positioning NCTE policy statements—The Students' Right to Read and NCTE Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write—as foundational guiding documents, Ochoa and her colleagues prove that even in today’s standards-driven environment, authentic reading and writing practices can create literacy-rich middle school classrooms.
As a bonus, teachers who don’t have strong support in their schools to implement these practices will find a myriad of suggestions for developing a virtual personal learning network—a grassroots professional development tailored to their needs and interests—that will support them in their efforts to help kids as readers and writers.
About Principles in Practice
Books in the Principles in Practice imprint offer teachers concrete illustrations of effective classroom practices based in NCTE research briefs and policy statements.Each book discusses the research on a specific topic, links the research to an NCTE brief or policy statement, and then demonstrates how those principles come alive in practice: by showcasing actual classroom practices that demonstrate the policies in action; by talking about research in practical, teacher-friendly language; and by offering teachers possibilities for rethinking their own practices in light of the ideas presented in the books.
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Beyond Progress in the Prison Classroom
Options and Opportunities
More LessThrough a mix of history, theory, and story, Anna Plemons explores the fate of the Arts in Corrections (AIC) program at New Folsom Prison in California in order to study prison education in general as well as the disciplinary goals of rhetoric and composition classrooms.
When viewed as a microcosm of the broader enterprise, the prison classroom highlights the way that composition and rhetoric as a discipline continues to make use of colonial ways of knowing and being that work against the decolonial intentions of the field. Plemons suggests that a truly decolonial turn in composition cannot be achieved as long as economic logics and rhetorics of individual transformation continue to be the default currency for ascribing value in prison writing programs specifically and in out-of-school writing communities more generally. Indigenous scholarship provides the theoretical basis for Plemons’s proposed intervention in the ways it both pushes back against individualized, economic assessments of value and describes design principles for research and pedagogy that are respectful, reciprocal, and relational.
Beyond Progress in the Prison Classroom includes narrative selections from the author and current and former AIC participants, inviting readers into the lives of incarcerated authors and demonstrating the effects of relationality on prison-scholars, ultimately upending the misconception that these writers and their teachers exist apart from the web of relations beyond the prison walls. With contributions from incarcerated prison-scholars Ken Blackburn, Bryson L. Cole, Harry B. Grant Jr., Adam Hinds, Hung-Linh "Ronnie" Hoang, Andrew Molino, Michael L. Owens, Wayne Vaka, and Martin Williams.
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.
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Beyond Standardized Truth
Improving Teaching and Learning through Inquiry-Based Reading Assessment
More LessBeyond Standardized Truth, included in the Principles in Practice imprint, is the result of the author’s own efforts to bridge the gap between valuing reading and being able to respond with appropriate instruction or evaluate growth in reading.
Scott Filkins brings us into his classroom and the classrooms of his colleagues to demonstrate how high school teachers across the disciplines can engage in inquiry-based reading assessment to support student learning. Based in the IRA–NCTE Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing, Revised Edition, the classroom portraits highlight the importance of incorporating genuinely formative assessment into our instruction.
Filkins unpacks his own history with assessment through engaging “confessions” of his early practices and eventual growth toward a framework that situates reading assessment in an inquiry model. Throughout the book, he showcases his colleagues’ attempts to use an inquiry framework, including the various tools and documentation methods that help them inquire into their students’ habits and thoughts as readers, use formative assessment to fuel the gradual release of responsibility framework, and use reading assessment as a means of professional reflection.
Finally, Filkins challenges us to broaden the conversation about assessment to a wider range of stakeholders and offers a vision of assessment as an expression of care for the students in our charge.
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Black Perspectives in Writing Program Administration
From the Margins to the Center
More LessEditors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building.
This collection centers writing program administration (WPA) discourse as intersectional race work. In this historical moment in public discourse when race and racist logics are no longer sanitized in coded language or veiled political rhetoric, contributors provide examples of how WPA scholars can push back against the ways in which larger, cultural rhetorical projects inform our institutional practices, are coded into administrative agendas, and are reflected in programmatic objectives and interpersonal relations. Editors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building. This framework also positions WPAs of color to build relationships with allies and create contexts for students and faculty to imagine rhetorics that speak truth to oppressive and divisive ideologies within and beyond the academy, but especially within writing programs. Contributors share not just experiences of racist microaggressions, but also the successes of black WPAs and WPAs whose work represents a strong commitment to students of color. Together they work to foster stronger alliance building among white allies in the discipline, and, most importantly, to develop concrete, specific models for taking action to confront and resist racist microaggressions. As a whole, this collection works to shift the focus from race more broadly toward perspectives on blackness in writing program administration.
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Bring on the Bard
Active Drama Approaches for Shakespeare’s Diverse Student Readers
More LessA deep dive into the rich resources available for teaching Shakespeare’s plays, Bring on the Bard is for every high school teacher—early career to veteran—looking for new, hands-on activities to draw students of all ability levels into the work and world of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare didn’t write his plays for readers; he wrote individual “cue scripts” for actors who hadn’t read the entire play but had to perform on the fly with almost no rehearsal. Those cue scripts have become the written form of his dramas, compiled originally in the First Folio of 1623. And the actors’ cues for meaning, emotion, and emphasis are still embedded in Shakespeare’s language, ripe for discovery by today’s students.
Shakespeare’s plays rightly remain a staple of the ELA curriculum, but evolving standards and youth culture itself challenge teachers to put students—not a text—at the center of a reading experience in order to support diverse readers and learners.
How can we do this?
Experienced educators Kevin Long and Mary T. Christel introduce us to the Folio technique, which builds on active drama approaches that position students to engage with a rich text through low-risk speaking and improvisation activities. Without requiring students to become actors, the Folio technique helps them to discover the clues the Bard built into his works that allow actors to efficiently understand their characters’ text, context, and subtext. Teachers can use excerpts from the First Folio along with a mass market paperback or digital edition of a play to help students get closer to Shakespeare’s intentions; understand the language, action, and emotions of the characters; and perhaps even explore the challenges the Bard’s modern editors face.
The book offers suggestions for using parallel text, graphic, and abridged editions of Shakespeare’s works, as well as activities using cue scripts and a variety of viewing experiences.
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Building Critical Literacy and Empathy with Graphic Novels
More LessBeginning with the assertion that educators can effectively use comics and graphic novels to develop readers’ critical literacy and empathy, DeHart explores the use of graphic novels across grade levels in a wide range of topics and themes. Taking When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed as a recurring focal text, DeHart argues that critical conversations can be opened up through well-chosen graphic novels. The book features recommended titles, insights from graphic novel authors and creators, and lesson ideas. Topics include:
- Anti-Bias and Anti-Bullying
- Autobiographical and Biographical Stories
- Gender Representation
- Diverse Abilities
- Black Joy, Black Lives Matter, and Antiracist Pedagogy
- Stories of (Im)migration and Removal
- Indigenous Peoples/First Nations Stories
- Mental Health and Grief
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Can We Talk?
Encouraging Conversation in High School Classrooms
More LessThe proverbial “lost art of conversation” has become more than a cliché. Once young people learned the art of conversation outside of the classroom—in their homes, in organized social groups, and with their peers—but today such human encounters are limited, partly because of the ubiquitous presence of technology. Face-to-face conversation offers a different and vital kind of connection, one that is at the core of our humanity and essential for a democratic society. As teachers, we have a responsibility to help our students find their voices and truly listen to the voices they hear. The strategies and activities described in this book are easily integrated into an already existing curriculum and will allow students to become not only better speakers, but better writers, better thinkers, and better human beings.
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Challenging Traditional Classroom Spaces with Young Adult Literature
Students in Community as Course Co-Designers
More LessAs a high school teacher, Ricki Ginsberg realized that a truly student-centered classroom requires student input. To foster a more ethical, community-based approach to curriculum design and instruction, she worked with her students to reimagine and co-design existing, grade-level courses, and in doing so, they integrated young adult literature as central to the curriculum and course design. In this book, Ginsberg, along with more than a dozen teacher contributors, shares course design possibilities for teachers seeking to disrupt and reimagine traditional structures with the inclusion of YA literature.
With communities of practice as a guiding framework, Challenging Traditional Classroom Spaces with YA Literature explores how teachers might work with students to build a community that defines their purposes together, how they might investigate new possibilities for existing or traditional courses by harnessing the potential of YA literature, how they might use critical freedom to co-develop YA electives, and how they can lead literate lives together as a community of practice that is engaged with their local and global communities.
Grounded in NCTE’s Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature position statement, this book offers both big ideas, such as overarching structural decisions and pedagogical positioning, as well as a wealth of flexible and adaptable practical strategies and ideas that can be implemented directly in secondary classrooms with varied contexts and purposes.
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Classroom Design for Student Agency
Create Spaces to Empower Young Readers and Writers
More LessClassrooms should be spaces where every child feels safe to bring their whole self to school. This book shows how to set up preK–grade 6 classrooms that support student agency, independence, and choice. The results of classrooms designed with these goals in mind include:
- Greater student engagement with curriculum
- Students who know themselves and are empowered as learners
- Students who feel valued and care about their learning as well as the learning of others
- A more cohesive, authentic, and accepting community of learners
- Opportunities for choice and decision-making by all learners
With examples drawn from real classrooms, the authors demonstrate how to make choices in seating, materials used, books read, and more. Special attention is paid to the design of classroom libraries in which a variety of diverse, quality books anchor so much of the work in helping young readers and writers grow and learn.
The book is richly illustrated with photos and samples to provide an inside look at classrooms in which children are centered and the teacher is responsive to creating spaces with student agency in mind.
172 pp. 2023. Grades PreK–6
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Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice
A History
More LessCollaborative learning is not only a standard part of writing pedagogy, but it is also a part of contemporary culture. Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice: A History examines the rich historical and political contexts of collaborative learning, starting with John Dewey’s impact on progressive education in the early twentieth century.
In the 1930s, for instance, collaborative practices flourished. In the 1950s, they operated in stealth, within an ideology suspicious of collaboration. Collaborative pedagogies blossomed in the protests of the 1960s and continued into the 1980s with the social turn in composition theory. Twenty-first-century collaborative practices influenced by pragmatism are found in writing centers, feminist pedagogies, and computer-mediated instruction. Mara Holt argues that as composition changes with the influence of ecological and posthuman theories, there is evidence of a significant pragmatist commitment to evaluating theory by its consequences.
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College Composition & Communication
More LessCollege Composition and Communication publishes research and scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies that supports college teachers in reflecting on and improving their practices in teaching writing and that reflects the most current scholarship and theory in the field. The field of composition studies draws on research and theories from a broad range of humanistic disciplines-English studies, rhetoric, cultural studies, LGBT studies, gender studies, critical theory, education, technology studies, race studies, communication, philosophy of language, anthropology, sociology, and others-and from within composition and rhetoric studies, where a number of subfields have also developed, such as technical communication, computers and composition, writing across the curriculum, research practices, and the history of these fields.
Editor
Malea Powell
Michigan State University
Editorial Assistant
Jill McKay Chrobak
Michigan State University
Contact Us
Email: [email protected]
Permission Requests
[email protected]
Next Editors Selected
NCTE and CCCC welcome Dr. Matthew Davis, of the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Dr. Kara Taczak, of the University of Central Florida, as incoming editors of College Composition and Communication. Kara and Matt were editorial assistants at CCC as graduate students and are thrilled to return to service at the journal after an editorial tenure at Composition Studies. Their first issue will be published in February 2025.
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College English
More LessCollege English is the professional journal for the college scholar-teacher. CE publishes articles about literature, rhetoric-composition, critical theory, creative writing theory and pedagogy, linguistics, literacy, reading theory, pedagogy, and professional issues related to the teaching of English. Issues may also include review essays.
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Continuing the Journey
Becoming a Better Teacher of Literature and Informational Texts
More LessAimed at accomplished veteran teachers, Continuing the Journey offers practical advice, encouragement, and cutting-edge ideas for today’s English classroom.
Coauthors Leila Christenbury and Ken Lindblom, well-known teachers, writers, and former editors of English Journal, are joined in this book by almost two dozen classroom teachers and researchers. Together they present real strategies for real classrooms and offer teachers ideas, insights, and support. Focused on literature and informational texts, this lively book (the first in a series) is a road map to professional renewal and to becoming a better teacher. Topics include:
- Changes in you, your classroom, and your school
- What it means to be a better teacher
- Teaching literary texts and literary nonfiction
- And incorporating the study of informational texts and of social media in your classroom
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Continuing the Journey 2
Becoming a Better Teacher of Authentic Writing
More LessKen Lindblom and Leila Christenbury return with the second volume in the Continuing the Journey series, this time focusing on authentic writing instruction for middle and high school classrooms.
The authors draw on what research has taught them about writing—concepts deeply rooted in personal identity and real-world experience—and why we must teach writing accurately, effectively, and fearlessly. As in the previous volume, the book includes visits to an ideal Teachers’ Lounge, featuring highly experienced colleagues and well-known researchers in English teaching.
Topics covered include:
- Responding to student writing
- Handling the paper load
- Teaching grammar and usage in the context of writing
- Seeking real-world feedback
Although once again focusing on a veteran English teacher audience, Lindblom and Christenbury provide a wealth of information, advice, and resources that will help teachers at any stage of their careers better support their students’ writing both in and out of school.
About Continuing the Journey
Continuing the Journey is a five-book series on advanced approaches to teaching English language arts. Written for veteran teachers by Leila Christenbury and Ken Lindblom, the books include “From the Teachers’ Lounge,” an innovative feature that honors the expertise of both colleagues from the field and highly regarded scholars. Topics addressed in the series include literature and informational texts; language and writing; listening, speaking, and presenting; digital literacies; and living the professional life of a veteran teacher.
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Continuing the Journey 3
Becoming a Better Teacher of Language, Speaking, and Listening
More LessIn this third book in the Continuing the Journey series, Ken Lindblom and Leila Christenbury explore teaching English language, speaking, and listening. Aimed at veteran teachers yet accessible to highly capable early career teachers, this book offers practical advice, encouragement, and cutting-edge ideas for today’s English classroom.
Drawing on contemporary and foundational research to infuse classrooms with substance and energy, the authors focus on authentic assignments with real-world value.
Topics in this volume include:
- Understanding and teaching language change and attention to culture
- Fostering audience-responsive communication
- Addressing today’s challenges for in-person and technology-enabled speaking
- Encouraging and assessing respectful talk and multimedia communication
- Managing heated conversations
- Grasping why deep listening may be a lost art, and how we can recover it.
Packed with classroom-ready approaches, provocative ideas, encouraging insights, as well as the authors’ anecdotes and asides, this book will entertain, educate, and inspire teachers who take seriously the importance of language, speaking, and listening in today’s dynamic world.
As an added benefit, teachers and scholars from across the country add their voices and experiences in the ideal Teachers’ Lounge, providing important and diverse perspectives and advice. The Teachers' Lounge contributors:
- Sydney Bryan
- Kelly Byrne Bull
- Tricia Ebarvia
- Christian Z. Goering
- Sharonica Nelson
- Molly S. Potas
- Kia Jane Richmond
- Jana L. Rieck
- Martha Sandven
- Brian Stzabnik
- Peter S. Willis
About Continuing the Journey
Continuing the Journey is a five-book series on advanced approaches to teaching English language arts. Written for veteran teachers by Leila Christenbury and Ken Lindblom, the books include “From the Teachers’ Lounge,” an innovative feature that honors the expertise of both colleagues from the field and highly regarded scholars. Topics addressed in the series include literature and informational texts; language and writing; listening, speaking, and presenting; digital literacies; and living the professional life of a veteran teacher.
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CoreEmpathy
Literacy Instruction with a Greater Purpose
More LessThe CoreEmpathy approach and accompanying lessons are designed to cultivate student empathy while simultaneously developing and deepening student literacy skills.
Why should you cultivate empathy in the classroom? Because it not only encourages mutual understanding and caring but also deepens literacy learning. When students walk in the shoes of story characters, the practice extends thoughtfulness to the real people in their lives.
The CoreEmpathy approach, developed by literacy specialist Christie McLean Kesler and children’s author Mary Knight, turns an empathy lens on the reading and writing essential to all K–6 classrooms, optimizing the connection between them. And rather than being one more thing you need to do, CoreEmpathy interweaves with classroom practices already in play, applicable to the stories the authors highlight as well as to student favorites.
Transform your literacy classroom with:
- A simple step-by-step approach to choosing and using already loved books from your current literacy curriculum
- The why, what, and how of teaching literacy through an empathy lens
- Plentiful examples from real-world classrooms, including the voices of teachers and students as they engage with story the CoreEmpathy way
- Practical tips for using the approach with established classroom practices
- Easy-to-use, K-6 integrated reading and writing lessons
- Vast resources for extending your empathy-rich knowledge and practice
- Inspiration for you to live teaching’s greater purpose now
With its heart in the joy that stories bring to readers of all ages, CoreEmpathy reinvigorates teaching and learning, with effects that last long past the elementary years.
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Council Chronicle
More LessNCTE's membership magazine covers issues and trends in the English language arts and tips and resources for your classroom.
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