This book examines how working-class high school students’ identity construction is continually mediated by discourses and cultural practices operating in their classroom, school, family, sports, community, and workplace worlds. Specifically, it addresses how responding to cultural differences portrayed in multicultural literature can serve to challenge adolescents’ allegiances to status quo discourses and cultural models, and how teachers not only can rouse students to clarify and change their value stances related to race, class, and gender, but also provide support for and validation of students’ self-interrogation. Highlighting the influence of sociocultural forces, the book contributes to understanding the role of institutions in shaping adolescents’ lives, and identifies needs that must be addressed to improve those institutions. Current theory and research on critical discourse analysis, cultural models theory, and identity construction is meshed with specific applications of that theory and research to case-study profiles and analysis of classroom discussions. The instructional strategies described enable pre-service and in-service teachers to develop their own literature curriculum and instructional methods.

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.

This title examines the relationship between identity and technology in the learning and lives of young people.

This popular textbook introduces prospective and practicing English teachers to current methods of teaching literature in middle and high school classrooms. It underscores the value of providing students with a range of different critical approaches and tools for interpreting texts and the need to organize literature instruction around topics and issues of interest to them. Throughout the textbook, readers are encouraged to raise and explore inquiry-based questions in response to authentic dilemmas and issues they face in the critical literature classroom. New in this edition, the text shows how these approaches to fostering responses to literature also work as rich tools to address the Common Core English Language Arts Standards. Each chapter is organized around specific questions that English educators often hear in working with pre-service teachers. Suggested pedagogical methods are modelled by inviting readers to interact with the book through critical-inquiry methods for responding to texts. Readers are engaged in considering authentic dilemmas and issues facing literature teachers through inquiry-based responses to authentic case narratives. A Companion Website [http://teachingliterature.pbworks.com] provides resources and enrichment activities, inviting teachers to consider important issues in the context of their current or future classrooms.

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.

This multidisciplinary handbook pulls together in one volume the research on children's and young adult literature which is currently scattered across three intersecting disciplines: education, English, and library and information science.

b>Winner of the 2007 Critics' Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association Late to Class presents theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical perspectives on social class and schooling in the United States. Grounding their analyses at the intersections of class, ethnicity, gender, geography, and schooling, the contributors examine the educational experiences of poor, working class, and middle class students against the backdrop of complicated class stratification in a shifting global economy. Together, they explore the salience of class in understanding the social, economic, and cultural landscapes within which young people in the United States come to understand the meaning of their formal education in times of changing opportunity.