Secondary English Classroom Research Articles

Standing but not Delivering: Preparing Pre-service Teachers to use LGBTQ Young Adult Literature in the Secondary English Classroom

Despite calls from national organizations (CAEP, NCTE) to prepare teachers to include the study of LGTBQ culture into classrooms, little progress has been made incorporating LGTBQ themed literature and dialogue surrounding LGBTQ issues in secondary classrooms (Clark, 2010; Sieben & Wallowitz, 2009; Haertling-Thein, 2013). To examine why, this qualitative case study explored the transition of two educators who participated in LGBTQ teacher training as teacher candidates from pre-service to practicing teachers. Consistent with current research, the researchers discovered that teacher training in LGBTQ literature and issues promoted an ally-stance. Participants came to recognize the need to include this genre within their curriculum as practicing teachers and made a commitment to do so. However, this stance was not enough to influence the actual use of LGBTQ literature and dialogue surrounding LGBTQ issues in the classroom. We discuss the factors that shape this resistance despite participants maintaining an ally-stance. We recommend a more widened scope of study of LGBTQ issues and literature within our English teacher education programs and added professional development of current practicing teachers and administrators in an effort to make explicit the literary value of LGBTQ themed texts and the responsibility for dialogue on LGBTQ issues to occur.

Along the write lines: A case study exploring activities to enable creative writing in a Secondary English classroom.

This article arises from a four week study of a class of 14‐15 year old students. The study explored students’ perception of themselves as writers and the effects of a variety of teaching and learning strategies on their creative writing responses. The aim of the project was to enhance the students’ creative writing, whilst ascertaining whether there were particular activities or types of writing that would lead to students perceiving more satisfactory outcomes in their writing. It answers the research question: What do I observe, and what do my students say, about the experience of different classroom based creative writing tasks?

Sanctioning a Space for Translanguaging in the Secondary English Classroom: A Case of a Transnational Youth

Sanctioning a Space for Translanguaging in the Secondary English Classroom: A Case of a Transnational Youth

From Keats to Kanye: Romantic Poetry and Popular Culture in the Secondary English Classroom

AbstractThis case study examined a Romanticism unit within a Year 9 English class in Sydney, Australia. It considered whether popular culture could build connections between students’ lives and Romanticism, and whether the process of remixing ‘high’ Romantic poetry with ‘low’ popular culture could foster student engagement. Thematic analysis of interview, survey, observation, and artifact data revealed three key findings. Firstly, through exploring popular culture texts, students believed Romantic concepts related to their world but not to them. Secondly, the extent to which students understood Romanticism through popular culture was influenced by personal, textual, and educational factors. Thirdly, students felt that the collaborative remixing process promoted freedom of expression. While many teachers are concerned that popular culture will displace canonical literature, this study found that this is not the case: incorporating popular culture is not an ‘either/or’ approach, but it is an enriching, complementary practice.

Opportunity to learn about disciplinary literacy in senior secondary English classrooms in New Zealand

ABSTRACTThe New Zealand education system is recognised internationally for its overall high quality. At the same time, there is a persistent gap in achievement between students in low socio‐economic status (SES) schools in which there is an over‐representation of Māori and Pasifika students, and students in more affluent communities. In this paper, we present the findings of a study that explored the participation and achievement rates of secondary school students in selected literacy standards, and used classroom observations to record practices and resources used in literacy teaching. Our findings show the extent to which unequal opportunities to learn (OTLs) for Māori and Pasifika and other students from low SES communities exist at the systems level as well as at the level of classroom instructional offerings. We discuss the factors specific to the New Zealand curriculum and assessment systems that contribute to the current situation and suggest possible ways to achieve a more equitable outcome for all students.

Dangerous and uncontrollable: The politics of creativity in Secondary English

This article explores how policy discourses of creativity have an impact on the way that secondary English teachers construct creativity themselves and the opportunities that they have to enact these constructions in their classrooms. In particular, it focuses on policy around language learning and creativity, identifying significant differences in the way that this is constructed compared with policy constructions of the relationship between more general aspects of learning and creativity. It uses data drawn from interviews with twelve teachers working in two secondary schools to identify patterns that might begin to emerge in a wider study with larger numbers of schools and teachers. While it is not intended as a comparative study, some of the data that emerges encourages consideration about the distribution of creativity in secondary English classrooms and whether this is affected by issues of social class. As such, creativity for the purposes of the article itself is constructed as a resource existing in language (Blommaert 2010), with language users able both to shape meaning in particular ways and to be shaped by the language that they in turn receive (Volosinov 2000; Bakhtin 2006): a construction by and large mirrored by the teachers interviewed, despite the multiple other uses to which creativity can be put (Banaji and Burn 2008; Jones 2009).

Working talk: developing a framework for the teaching of collaborative talk

This study draws on the findings of an ESRC and British Telecom funded study which explored the teaching of collaborative talk. A teaching intervention was designed which adopted the principles of dialogic teaching, but which, drawing on educational linguistics, particularly emphasised the role of metatalk in developing students’ awareness of the interpersonal processes of collaborative talk. To facilitate the development of this metatalk, a framework was devised which described collaborative talk as a process of participating, understanding and managing. The research project was a rich qualitative study based on two secondary English classrooms in two different schools, capturing group interaction through video and audio data capture. Drawing on the findings from analysis of data, this study will present transcripts from one group in each school to describe how the strands, participating, understanding and managing, appeared in students’ collaborative talk. It will illustrate how these strands may develop in talk over time, visible in the increased ‘attunement’ of students’ turns. It explores how the framework facilitated the development of students’ collaborative and metatalk, and how it can be used to foster effective dialogic talk about language. The framework for collaborative talk represents an original contribution to research which conceptualises effective educational peer dialogue, and its use as a scaffold for metatalk draws attention to the role of metalinguistic understanding in talk development.

One educator, four perspectives

Purpose – The author of this paper aims to reflect on the past 14 years of English education in the USA and the resulting effects of state standards and standards implementation on secondary English teachers. Design/methodology/approach – Controversy surrounding standards implementation often includes balancing the struggle between teacher autonomy and district-mandated curriculum. The journey described here includes four roles in education: first, an undergraduate in a teacher education program at a state university; second, a classroom teacher learning to create pacing guides based on the standards; third, a graduate student writing a dissertation about standards implementation; and, fourth, a teacher educator who works with pre-service and practicing teachers. Findings – Educators at all levels must determine how to best navigate standards to help students succeed in the classroom, and what teaching practices must endure even in the face of increased standardization. Originality/value – Lack of curricular autonomy and few teacher-centered professional development opportunities during early standards implementation experiences led the author to understand the importance of a workshop model of standards implementation for teachers. In addition, strong support for reading and writing workshops in the secondary English Language Arts classroom is also provided, including the specific Common Core Standards met during these classroom activities.

Disabling Assumptions: Achieving full inclusion via Narratives in the Secondary English Classroom

This column explores how paying attention to disability—both to the rich contributions made by people with disabilities and to the sometimes negative attitudes in society that can interfere with those contributions—can foster classroom interactions that are more democratic, more inclusive, and more equitable.

A Counterstory of One's Own

AbstractNationwide, virtually all secondary students interact with British literature, a traditionally Anglo, white, male canon. Yet, this revered curriculum provides few mirrors for students from historically marginalized populations to see their own cultures reflected. In this reflective practitioner piece, the authors first illustrate how counterstorytelling—a practice emerging from critical race theory—can break open the canon. Because counterstorytelling invites, values, and projects marginalized voices, when incorporated into the secondary English classroom, the practice helps engage students with the material while developing and honing their literacy skills. Second, the authors detail a lesson demonstrating that the canon and counterstorytelling can work synergistically. Throughout the article, the authors attend to the challenges of using an equity pedagogy to teach a canon that functions as the majoritarian story of the secondary literacy classroom—and society at large. Finally, the authors offer strategies for effectively incorporating counterstorytelling into the secondary English classroom.

Examining the heteropatriarchy: Canadian and American male teachers’ perspectives of sexual minority curriculum

This study was concerned with an examination of the heteropatriarchy as it was performed by six self-identified heterosexual male English teachers and two high school administrators in the United States and Canada. These educators explained their efforts regarding their own thinking about identity and curriculum and their attempts to teach a sexual minority curriculum. Queer theory provided the lens for the research when considering pedagogical approaches that addressed differing identities, in general, and sexuality, in particular. Data were produced through individual teacher interviews, classroom observations, written reflections, and school curriculum materials. Administrators were also interviewed regarding school policies and curriculum expectations. These data were collected and analyzed using phenomenological methods, ethnographic techniques, case studies, and biographic life histories between 2006 and 2012 academic years. Participants were included in the meaning making of the documentation process through collaborative interrogation of their interview transcripts. The value of this research lies in its potential to consider pedagogical methods for addressing sexual minority curriculum in the secondary education English classroom in relationship to teacher identity.

The Development of Young Writers in an English Classroom: Opening Up Dialogue with Year 8 Students

This essay explores what the development of writing might look like and how it might take shape in a secondary English classroom. The study problematises current definitions of progress. In direct opposition to standards-driven models, I propose an alternative way of thinking about the development of writers through a series of narrative accounts that shed light on actual learning moments. The study explores the potential of gaining insight into a learner’s writing history, their attitudes and feelings towards writing, the potential of fostering writing communities and finding alternative ways of responding to writing. I argue that current assessment regimes misrepresent how writers develop and thus tend to have a negative impact on learners’ confidence and enjoyment of writing.

From the Editors

Dear JAAL community, The title for this issue, “Enlightened Brotherhood,” refers to the cover image, a photograph taken by M. Denzell Moton from the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. Although Moton does not consider himself a photographer, he has made it a practice to catch off-guard moments of his fraternity brothers with his iPhone. This particular photo illustrates the young men choosing a song to play at the reception where one of their brothers was “jumping the broom” with his fiancée. This issue pays homage to Walter Dean Myers in Alfred Tatum's commentary, “Writing Through the Labyrinth of Fears: The Legacy of Walter Dean Myers.” Tatum's commentary celebrates Myers's near-50-year body of work and charges writing teachers to develop the critical writing voices of adolescents, especially young black men during a time in U.S. history that needs to hear these perspectives. Guadalupe López-Bonilla's column, “Curricular Reforms in Mexico: Challenges for Developing Disciplinary Literacy in Upper Secondary Education” featured in Raul Mora's Policy and Advocacy department, describes the challenges and debates associated with recent educational reforms in Mexico that have extended national public schooling and disciplinary learning up to age 15. In this issue's Pop Culture/Digital Literacies department (edited by Jennifer Scott Curwood), Jill Castek and Julie Coiro summarize some key findings about online reading comprehension and share design considerations and challenges for capturing online research and skills to inspire new ideas about literacy instruction that uses digital literacies and new technologies. Sharon Pitcher's Literacy Lens, “Web 2.0 Reflective Inquiry: A Transformative Literacy Teacher Education Tool,” discusses a blog where teachers shared the challenges of incorporating digital literacies instruction in their classrooms. Benjamin Boche's feature article, “Multimodal Scaffolding in the Secondary English Classroom Curriculum,” illustrates how an English teacher used a variety of multimodal texts to help students understand complex texts as part of an interdisciplinary environmental studies curriculum in which English, environmental studies, and social studies were team-taught through thematic units. Anne Guerin and Brian Murphy discuss the reading fluency development of three young adolescent striving readers in a seven-week intervention program in Southern Ireland in “Repeated Reading as a Method to Improve Reading Fluency for Struggling Adolescent Readers.” Lee Mountain explains a content area assignment given to preservice teachers across various disciplines to better understand the connections between their content area vocabulary and comprehension in “Recurrent Prefixes, Roots, and Suffixes: A Morphemic Approach to Disciplinary Literacy.” In “The Affordances of Blogs and Digital Video: New Potentials for Exploring Topics and Representing Meaning,” Jason Ranker describes how two ninth-grade adolescent males used blogs and digital video (among other media) to inquire into the subject matter of fast food in a self-chosen topic of a class-assigned inquiry project. Finally, male zine authors' composing processes are explored and analyzed, with implications provided for content area learning, in “‘Nomadic Knowledge’: Men Writing Zines for Content Learning” by Barbara Guzzetti, Leslie Foley, and Mellinee Lesley. Stergios Botzakis's Visual and Digital Texts review, “Smartphone Resources for Teachers,” describes apps that connect teachers to students and their parents. James Blasingame's Print-Based Texts column includes three book reviews: Bill Nye's (2014) Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, Ellen Hopkins's (2014) Rumble, and Jack Gantos's (2014) The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza. In selecting these texts, Blasingame presents topics and characters whose identities are often marginalized in mainstream literature and institutions. In the Professional Resources column, Marcelle Haddix further examines the significance of “Enlightened Brotherhood” as she reiterates the need to continuously and explicitly state that “Black Lives Matter.” This call is highlighted this month in reviews written by Darrell Cleveland Hucks of Trayvon Martin, Race, and American Justice: Writing Wrong edited by Fasching-Varner, Reynolds, Albert, and Martin and by Kenneth Fasching-Varner of (Re)Teaching Trayvon: Education for Racial Justice and Human Freedom edited by Evans-Winters and Bethune. Finally, Peggy Semingson's Meeting of the Minds asks JAAL users to name the literacy leader who most informs their thinking, wrapping up the issue with the important recognition of the connection between scholarship and practice. Happy reading, Emily Neil Skinner & Margaret Carmody Hagood

Multimodal Scaffolding in the Secondary English Classroom Curriculum

AbstractThis article examines the topic of multimodal scaffolding in the secondary English classroom curriculum through the viewpoint of one teacher's experiences. With technology becoming more commonplace and readily available in the English classroom, we must pinpoint specific and tangible ways to help teachers use and teach multimodalities in their classrooms that promote student learning across a broad variety of text types and tap into higher levels of thinking. Teachers can then help students apply what they learn from multimodal scaffolding to address increasingly complex texts as outlined in the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS). This article identifies and demonstrates ways to help students develop as readers as well as helping teachers use specific multimodal instructional strategies to target text complexity.

Gambling with Nonsense: Play and the Secondary English Classroom

Dominant and common-sense contemporary conceptions of practice tend to frame the emotional volatility of the classroom – most commonly explored in discussions about student behaviour – as a fundamental obstacle to teaching and learning. The ‘outstanding’ classroom is both orderly and, paradoxically perhaps, characterised by its passionate, and vocal, student engagement. In this piece I draw on D.W. Winnicott’s writing about play and aggression, exploring his ideas in the context of my work with two classes as a secondary English teacher at an inner-city comprehensive; doing so, I attempt to reframe both my own and my students’ affectively charged experience of the classroom as valuable rather than problematic. I posit certain moments of playfulness as a kind of pedagogical patience: less an evasion of, or a disruption to, the business of the curriculum, and more a route to meaningful engagement with it.

‘All in Favour, Say Aye!’ Voting in Pupils’ Collaborative Talk

This paper draws on the findings of an Economic and Social Research Council and British Telecom-funded project which explored the teaching of collaborative talk in the secondary English classroom. During the analysis of the video data collected, voting was observed as a strategy in pupils’ collaborative decision-making. Converse to its democratic purpose, the vote was often initiated as a means of dominating or controlling the outcome of a collaborative task. Yet, some pupils challenged the use of the vote as their awareness of collaborative talk processes developed. In one group, the vote appeared to ‘scaffold’ the participation of a reluctant collaborator. Through the presentation of transcripts, this paper explores the nature and implications of the vote as used by pupils in collaborative talk. It contributes to understanding of pupils’ independent talk in the classroom and prompts consideration of the vote as a productive tool in pupils’ decision-making.

Approaching Narrative Text with a Film Director’s Mindset: Producing Real and Imagined Scenes in the Secondary English Classroom

Approaching Narrative Text with a Film Director’s Mindset: Producing Real and Imagined Scenes in the Secondary English Classroom

Queer(ing) Literature in the Secondary English Classroom

Queer(ing) Literature in the Secondary English Classroom

Engaging Latino/a Students in the Secondary English Classroom: A Step Toward Breaking the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Behavior issues in the classroom directly relate to the teaching style and the type of interactions between the teacher and students. In particular, Latino/a students need to be engaged in the curriculum content if they are to be successful, both academically and emotionally. If this does not occur, then behavioral issues will arise, which will then feed into the school-to-prison pipeline theory.

Creative Crisis

Violent writing is a real, yet rarely understood phenomenon in the secondary and post-secondary classroom. The 2007 Virginia Tech shooting tragedy sensationalized violent writing as a marker of disturbed and violent persons. However, violent writing comes in multiple forms and is composed for multiple reasons. As secondary schools wrestle with issues of school safety, they may be neglecting the front line role of English teachers confronted with violent texts, as well as the implications for student safety outside of school. This study defines and presents a typology for violent writing and reports on the prevalence of such writings among secondary English classrooms in a southern US state. The study uses quantitative and qualitative data to explore the construct. Research suggests that teachers should expect to receive samples of violent writing, particularly from victimized students. The disturbing number of domestic abuse and self-inflicted violence texts has implications for teacher response.