Countering the increased standardization of English language arts instruction requires recognizing and fostering students’ unique identity construction across different social and cultural contexts. Drawing on current sociocultural theories of identity construction, this book posits that students construct multiple identities through use of five identity practices: adopting alternative perspectives, exploring connections across people and texts, negotiating identities across social worlds, developing agency through critical analysis, and reflecting on long-term identity trajectories. Identity-Focused ELA Teaching features classroom activities teachers can use to put these practices into action in ways that re-center implementing the Common Core State Standards; case-study profiles of students and classrooms from urban, suburban, and rural schools adopting these practices; and descriptions of how teachers both support students with this instructional approach and share their own identity-construction experiences with their students. It demonstrates how, as students acquire identity-focused practices through engagements with literature, writing, drama, and digital texts, they gain awareness of the ways exposure to different narratives, beliefs, and perspectives serves to mediate their own and others’ identities, leading to different ways of being and becoming over time.

Countering the increased standardization of English language arts instruction requires recognizing and fostering students’ unique identity construction across different social and cultural contexts. Drawing on current sociocultural theories of identity construction, this book posits that students construct multiple identities through use of five identity practices: adopting alternative perspectives, exploring connections across people and texts, negotiating identities across social worlds, developing agency through critical analysis, and reflecting on long-term identity trajectories. Identity-Focused ELA Teaching features classroom activities teachers can use to put these practices into action in ways that re-center implementing the Common Core State Standards; case-study profiles of students and classrooms from urban, suburban, and rural schools adopting these practices; and descriptions of how teachers both support students with this instructional approach and share their own identity-construction experiences with their students. It demonstrates how, as students acquire identity-focused practices through engagements with literature, writing, drama, and digital texts, they gain awareness of the ways exposure to different narratives, beliefs, and perspectives serves to mediate their own and others’ identities, leading to different ways of being and becoming over time.

The field of English language arts teacher education has experienced change over the past two decades. Changes in the discipline have produced a much more expansive understanding of literacy and of what teachers of English language arts do. This volume will focus on innovations in English language arts teacher education.

Leaders in English Language Arts Education Research contains autobiographical essays by leading English Language Arts scholars throughout the world. In this volume, English Language Arts is presented as a complex and porous discipline—intersecting with writing, literacy studies, multicultural/multilingual education, digital and multimodal literacies, critical and social justice pedagogies, teacher education, linguistics and second language learning, and, not least of all, subject English, including teaching literature and drama. Contributors are retired or current professors in the following countries: Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, South Africa, and the United States. ELA scholars often begin their careers as K-12 teachers and then become teacher-educators at universities; due to this, they work at the intersection of theory and practice throughout their careers. Therefore, this volume will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate English Language Arts Education students as well as to in-service English practitioners. This volume will also appeal to ELA researchers at all levels since it contains first-hand, personal narratives of well-established ELA researchers as they reflect on their own development as scholars.

This book approaches English instruction through the lens of “fi gured worlds,” which recognizes and spotlights how students are actively engaged in constructing their own school, peer group, extracurricular, and community worlds. Teachers’ ability not only to engage with students’ experiences and interests in and outside of school but also to build connections between students’ worlds and their teaching is essential for promoting student agency, engagement, and meaningful learning. Beach and Caraballo provide an accessible framework for working with students to use critical discourse, narratives, media, genres, and more to support their identity development through addressing topics that are meaningful for them— their families, social issues, virtual worlds, and more. Through extensive activities and examples of students writing about their participation in these worlds, this text allows educators to recognize how students’ experiences in the classroom aff ect and shape their identities and to connect such an understanding to successful classroom practice. With chapters featuring eff ective instructional activities, this book is necessary reading for ELA methods courses and for all English teachers.

Timely, thoughtful, and comprehensive, this text directly supports pre-service and in-service teachers in developing curriculum and instruction that both addresses and exceeds the requirements of the Common Core State Standards. Adopting a critical inquiry approach, it demonstrates how the Standards’ highest and best intentions for student success can be implemented from a critical, culturally relevant perspective firmly grounded in current literacy learning theory and research. It provides specific examples of teachers using the critical inquiry curriculum framework of identifying problems and issues, adopting alternative perspectives, and entertaining change in their classrooms to illustrate how the Standards can not only be addressed but also surpassed through engaging instruction. The Second Edition provides new material on adopting a critical inquiry approach to enhance student engagement and critical thinking planning instruction to effectively implement the CCSS in the classroom fostering critical response to literary and informational texts using YA literature and literature by authors of color integrating drama activities into literature and speaking/listening instruction teaching informational, explanatory, argumentative, and narrative writing working with ELL students to address the language Standards using digital tools and apps to respond to and create digital texts employing formative assessment to provide supportive feedback preparing students for the PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments using the book’s wiki site http://englishccss.pbworks.com for further resources

This book explores English language arts instruction from the perspective of language as "social actions" that students and teachers enact with and toward one another to create supportive, trusting relations between students and teachers, and among students as peers. Departing from a code-based view of language as a set of systems or structures, the perspective of languaging as social actions takes up language as emotive, embodied, and inseparable from the intellectual life of the classroom. Through extensive classroom examples, the book demonstrates how elementary and secondary ELA teachers can apply a languaging perspective. Beach and Beauchemin employ pedagogical cases and activities to illustrate how to enhance students’ engagement in open-ended discussions, responses to literature, writing for audiences, drama activities, and online interactions. The authors also offer methods for fostering students' self-reflection to improve their sense of agency associated with enhancing relations in face-to-face, rhetorical, and online contexts.