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English Language Arts/ Elementary
Revolutionary Love for Black Children in Early Childhood Classrooms
This article explores how to disrupt anti-Blackness in early childhood education by teaching from a pro-Black stance. The authors explain African Diaspora literacy and illuminate classroom practices in kindergarten first grade and third grade. Readers are guided to transform their spaces and ensure that Black children are well.
Departments: From Language Arts to Learning Communities: Honoring All Children through a Black Gaze Framework
Inspired by the Black Gaze Framework and with the notion to elevate consciousness freedom and the value of Black lives we share ideas on how educational leaders can engage with a BGF to elevate literacy learning.
Departments: Perspectives on Practice: Bringing Hip Hop Culture into the Classroom: Hip Hop Lyrics as Mentor Text
This Perspective on Practice discusses how teachers can use hip hop lyrics as a mentor text to engage students through literacy instruction.
Departments: Civic Literacies: Learning to Stand Up for Ourselves: Using Literacy as a Vehicle for Change
Over the coming year this column will explore the question “What does it mean to prepare students for civic engagement?” To begin this inquiry Chris Hass shares how one third-grade student’s epiphany that literacy is meant to help us stand up for ourselves inspired his class to spend a year exploring how they could use their reading writing and speaking to transform their world for the better.
Black Children’s Literature Policy, Publishing, Response, and Engagement: Where Do We Go from Here?
This article examines three interrelated aspects concerning reader access development and engagement with Black children’s literature—educational policies and surveillance of Black children’s literature publishing trends and Black youths’ reader response—to consider what these elements tell us about where the field of Black children’s literature might go from here.
Shifting the Gaze to Blackness in ELA: Using the Black Gaze Framework in Literacy Teacher Education Courses
Using the Black Gaze Framework (BGF) this article details how to center Blackness in literacy teacher education courses.
Departments: Perspectives on Practice: Embracing Every Hue: Using Our Narratives to Cultivate Healing
Using my personal narrative as a testimony this article will demonstrate how teachers can use their stories to reflect; strengthen their literacy instruction; and cultivate a space of bravery healing and love in their classrooms.
Departments: Children’s Literature Reviews: “Walk together, children”
In this column the author features children’s books that combat single ahistorical narratives about Black excellence and elucidate and promote its diverse manifestations in Africa and throughout the Diaspora.
Departments: Perspectives on Practice: To Dream, to Fly, and to Be: Depictions of Black Livingness in Contemporary African American Children’s Literature
In this column we expand the concept of Black Livingness as a lens to evaluate and select African American children’s literature.
Departments: Responsive Teaching in Action: The Extraordinary Ordinary in Trauma-Responsive Literacies toward Justice
Responsive teaching can question the boundary between the ordinary and extraordinary and recognize the connection between what can seem benign with what is undoubtedly profound.
Departments: From Language Arts to Learning Communities: Critical Literacy as a Frame to Support Students as Co-designers of Their Learning
(Re)considering ways to engage with students in the design of learning through a critical approach to curriculum.
Orienting Ourselves toward the Critical: Language Arts as a Gathering Ground for Critical Conversations in the Last Twenty Years
This column notes Language Arts’ contributions in orienting the community toward a critical literacy pedagogy through uplifting the work of practitioners and researchers who engage children in critical conversations.
Engaging Elementary Students beyond the Text through Multimodal Critical Literacy
This article explores the process of enacting critical literacy practices in a fourth-grade classroom using tenets of cultural reader response theory.
Tracing Discourse across a Century of Language Arts
Using topic modeling analysis we examine patterns in articles published in Language Arts from 1924 to 2020.