Young Adult Literature Course Research Articles

Cultivating critical race theory awareness with secondary pre‐service teachers through examination of Black Lives Matter‐themed literature

AbstractThis study documents secondary pre‐service teachers (PSTs) who examined Black Lives Matter (BLM)‐themed young adult literature (YAL) embedded in contemporary realistic fiction and graphic novels, as part of coursework for an online YAL course required for secondary teacher certification. An analysis of instructor mentoring, online discussions, literature evaluations, and interviews demonstrates enhanced awareness of the need to implement BLM‐themed literature, against the grain of rigid curricular requirements and policies that ban critical race theory (CRT) dialogue in numerous school districts. Moreover, PSTs identified these texts as a source to guide CRT to raise awareness of the history and permanence of systemic racism and its influence on contemporary society and the implementation of culturally relevant literature.

Research: “So, you’re not homophobic, just racist and hate gay Muslims?”: Reading Queer Difference in Young Adult Literature with LGBTQIA+ Themes

Reading moments of classroom talk as text, we explored how prospective teachers in a Teaching Diverse Young Adult Literature course read and responded to Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores, a text with a Muslim LGBTQIA+ theme. Thinking with queer theory—and its constituent concept, homonationalism, more specifically—we examined how discourses of difference, both liberatory and oppressive, were shaped as notions of collective acceptance, tolerance, and inclusion intersected with interpersonal contradictions and contingencies. Using critical discourse analysis to trace how the “queer, Muslim other” was indexed in conversation, we highlight the promises and pitfalls of leveraging diverse youth literature as students examined and extended the privilege of personhood through the particulars of a single text.

Slowly shifting out of neutral

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore how preservice teachers in a young adult literature course critically conceptualize discussions in school spaces about race and police/community relations; and to understand the constraints and affordances of using the young adult (YA) novel, All American Boys, as a critical literacy tool for discussing race and police/community relations.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative exploratory case study (Stake, 1995) investigated 24 pre-service teachers in two university YA literature courses as they read and discussed All American Boys. Thematic analysis consisted of open coding through the theoretical lenses of critical literacy and critical race theory.FindingsPre-service English language arts teachers largely thought that while race and police relations was important and the YA book was powerful, it was too political. Their fears about what might happen lead to privileging the role of neutrality as the desired goal for teachers when tackling difficult conversations about racial injustice in America. Although students made some shifts in terms of moving from neutral to more critical stances, three sub-themes of neutrality were predominant: a need for both sides of the story, the view that all beliefs are valid and the belief that we are all humans therefore all lives matter equally.Originality/valueA search at the time of this study yielded few research tackling racial injustice and community/police relations through YA literature in the classroom. This study is important as stories of police brutality and racism are all too common and adolescents are too often the victims.

Under Discussion: Teaching Speaking and Listening: Promoting Social Justice: Rehearsing Discussion Leadership in a Young Adult Literature Course

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Exploring queer pedagogies in the college-level YA literature course

ABSTRACTOne place to start understanding how pre-service teachers learn about contemporary young adult (YA) literature, especially those works that feature lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) and gender identity themes and characters, is through an examination of the YA literature course – a course many pre-service teachers take as part of their teacher certification programs in the USA. In this article, I turn to queer pedagogy to explore the syllabi of 67 college-level YA literature courses in order to address the question: ‘How do young adult literature courses incorporate the growing body of high-quality young adult literature that features LGBTQ and gender variant themes and characters?’ Findings include how the YA literature field might be normalizing, or standardizing through repeated approaches, what it means to teach a text and in turn shape future teachers’ decisions on how a text is incorporated into a curriculum.

Tensions in Teaching Adolescence/ts: Analyzing Resistances In A Young Adult Literature Course

AbstractIdentifying English Education courses focused on young adult literature as apposite sites for exploring teacher conceptions of youth and the texts aimed for youths’ consumptions, this article addresses the multiple sources of tension—and pedagogical potential—of teaching a young adult literature course centrally framed around controversial discourses of adolescence. Reflecting on six years of teaching the course at two different institutions with a strong focus on critical perspectives of youth, the article examines why students in the class would understandably strain against this curriculum, as well as what it might mean for secondary literacy curricula and secondary students if teacher educators and secondary teachers take up these pedagogical risks and sources of resistance in efforts to interrupt dominant and stereotypical discourses about youth.

Altering Perspectives: How the Implied Reader Invites Us to Rethink the Difficulty of Graphic Novels

This article reports the author's experiences using graphic novels with pre-service teachers in a young adult literature course. Drawing on critical response papers two students composed after reading Pride of Baghdad, a graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, the author argues that when readers possess the background knowledge needed to approximate the role of the implied reader—that is, the imaginary audience for whom authors envision themselves writing—they are capable of engaging with graphic novels in ways that readers who lack experience with the form, or who question its literary merit, are not.

Girlhood, Sexual Violence, and Agency in Francesca Lia Block’s “Wolf”

This essay examines the representation of adolescent girlhood, sexual violence and agency in Francesca Lia Block’s contemporary fairy tale collection The Rose and The Beast. Focusing specifically on the tale “Wolf,” the author provides a literary analysis of how Block draws on and reworks traditional Western fairy tale variants to reintroduce repressed material about father–daughter incest and sexual violence within the family. This theoretical analysis is augmented by a discussion of how 25 students enrolled in an undergraduate young adult literature course for pre-service English education students read Block’s “Wolf.” The author concludes that despite Block’s revisionist attempts to attend to the rapacious father figure, evidence from student readings reveals that they interpret “Wolf” in ways that fit broader cultural pedagogies of femininity that position the girl as a victim who must learn to defend her body. The author concludes with a discussion of the possibilities and limitations of how gender, sexual violence, and agency can be represented, read, and taught in a contemporary context amidst conflicting cultural scripts of girlhood vulnerability and empowerment.

Teaching Social Justice through Young Adult Literature

Young adult literature provides a context for students to become conscious of their operating world view and to critically examine alternative ways of understanding the world and social relations. Glasgow structures her college-level young adult literature course to foreground social justice. In this article she describes a project in which her class collaborated with a high school class, which relied on technology and email correspondence to make social difference.

The Young Adult Literature Course: Facilitating the Integration of YAL into The High School English Classroom

The Young Adult Literature Course: Facilitating the Integration of YAL into The High School English Classroom

PROFESSIONAL ISSUES - The Young Adult Literature Course: Young Readers Teach Prospective Teachers about Reading Interests and Reading Response

PROFESSIONAL ISSUES - The Young Adult Literature Course: Young Readers Teach Prospective Teachers about Reading Interests and Reading Response