The book is interdisciplinary in focus and centers on enlarging teachers understanding of how reading and writing can change lives and how the language arts can contribute significantly to and change educational processes in the twenty-first century. Implicit in its argument is that although the emphasis on science and math is crucial to education in the digital edge, it remains vitally important to keep reading and writing, language and story, at the heart of the educational process. This is particularly true in a democratic society because shaping stories through human language can enhance the quality of our lives, and teach us something important about what it means to be human and vulnerable. In this sense, stories allow for self-reflection and an increased opportunity to enhance and understand emotional intelligence and human community.

The book is interdisciplinary in focus and centers on enlarging teachers' understanding of how reading and writing can change lives and how the language arts can contribute significantly to and change educational processes in the twenty-first century. Implicit in its argument is that although the emphasis on science and math is crucial to education in the digital edge, it remains vitally important to keep reading and writing, language and story, at the heart of the educational process. This is particularly true in a democratic society because shaping stories through human language can enhance the quality of our lives, and teach us something important about what it means to be human and vulnerable. In this sense, stories allow for self-reflection and an increased opportunity to enhance and understand emotional intelligence and human community.

Bringing together strands of public discourse about valuing personal achievement at the expense of social values and the impacts of global capitalism, mass media, and digital culture on the lives of children, this book challenges the potential of science and business to solve the world’s problems without a complementary emphasis on social values. The selection of literary works discussed illustrates the power of literature and human arts to instill such values and foster change. The book offers a valuable foundation for the field of literacy education by providing knowledge about the importance of language and literature that educators can use in their own teaching and advocacy work.

In this volume, university researchers and urban elementary teacher-researchers coauthor chapters on the teachers' year-long inquiries, on a range of literacy topics that they conducted as part of a collaborative school-university action research project. Central to this project was the teacher-researchers' attempts to transform their teaching practices to meet the needs of students from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, and their finding that their inquiry efforts resulted in developing more collaborative styles of teaching. Because the everyday interactions between teachers and students are realized by the social talk in the classroom, the university- and teacher-researchers analyzed classroom discourse to study and document the teachers' efforts to make changes in the locus of power in literacy teaching and learning. The chapters include many classroom discourse examples to illustrate the critical points or incidents of these teachers' inquiries. They show the successes and the struggles involved in shedding teacher-controlled patterns of talk. This book explores the process of urban teachers' journeys to create dialogically organized literacy instruction in particular literacy routines--called, in this book, curriculum genres. The book is organized in terms of these curriculum genres, such as writing curriculum genres, reading-aloud curriculum genres, drama curriculum genres, and so forth. Teacher inquiries were conducted in various elementary grade levels, from kindergarten through grade eight. Three occurred in bilingual classrooms and one in a special education classroom. The first and last chapters, written by the editors, provide the background, theoretical, and methodological underpinnings of the project.

This book explores creative writing and its various relationships to education through a number of short, evocative chapters written by key players in the field. At times controversial, the book presents issues, ideas and pedagogic practices related to creative writing in and around education, with a focus on higher education. The volume aims to give the reader a sense of contemporary thinking and to provide some alternative points of view, offering examples of how those involved feel about the relationship between creative writing and education. Many of the contributors play notable roles in national and international organizations concerned with creative writing and education. The book also includes a Foreword by Philip Gross, who won the 2009 TS Eliot Prize for poetry.

Shining a spotlight on everyday readers of the 21st century, Beth Driscoll explores how contemporary readers of Anglophone fiction interact with the book industry, digital environments, and each other. We live in an era when book clubs, bibliomemoirs, Bookstagram and BookTok are as valuable to some readers as solitary reading moments. The product of nearly two decades of qualitative research into readers and reading culture, What Readers Do examines reading through three dimensions - aesthetic conduct, moral conduct, and self-care – to show how readers intertwine private and social behaviors, and both reinforce and oppose the structures of capitalism. Analyzing reading as a post-digital practice that is a synthesis of both print and digital modes and on- and offline behaviors, Driscoll presents a methodology for studying readers that connects book history, literary studies, sociology, and actor-network theory. Arguing for the vitality, agency, and creativity of readers, this book sheds light on how we read now - and on how much more readers do than just read.

Now in its fourth edition, this popular textbook introduces prospective and practicing English teachers to current methods of teaching literature in middle and high school classrooms. This new edition broadens its focus to cover important topics such as critical race theory; perspectives on teaching fiction, nonfiction, and drama; the integration of digital literacy; and teacher research for ongoing learning and professional development. It underscores the value of providing students with a range of different critical approaches and tools for interpreting texts. It also addresses the need to organize literature instruction around topics and issues of interest to today’s adolescents. By using authentic dilemmas and contemporary issues, the authors encourage preservice English teachers and their instructors to raise and explore inquiry-based questions that center on the teaching of a variety of literary texts, both classic and contemporary, traditional and digital. New to the Fourth Edition: Expanded attention to digital tools, multimodal learning, and teaching online New examples of teaching contemporary texts Expanded discussion and illustration of formative assessment Revised response activities for incorporating young adult literature into the literature curriculum Real-world examples of student work to illustrate how students respond to the suggested strategies Extended focus on infusing multicultural and diverse literature in the classroom Each chapter is organized around specific questions that preservice teachers consistently raise as they prepare to become English language arts teachers. The authors model critical inquiry throughout the text by offering authentic case narratives that raise important considerations of both theory and practice. A companion website, a favorite of English education instructors, http://teachingliterature.pbworks.com, provides resources and enrichment activities, inviting teachers to consider important issues in the context of their current or future classrooms.