Overview

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.

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9781032160511

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Reviews

A fresh and stimulating perspective on drawing creatively from student perspectives and experiences. Here we have clarity, scholarship, and strong arguments for learning about human abilities by listening intently and recognizing the immense power of student experiences and feelings. Fascinating and persuasive exemplars throughout the volume. --Shirley Brice Heath, Professor Emerita, Stanford University, USA What would it mean-and how might it happen-if teachers and students were to juxtapose the social practices of their everyday lives outside of school with those of the secondary English language arts classroom? How might they together author new 'worlds' in which caring, mutuality, curiosity, wonder, justice, and community were both the how and the what of classroom learning? These are the questions Beach and Caraballo explore building on observations of and interviews with teachers and students who themselves are exploring such questions in their own classrooms. At a time when classroom education suffers from the modernist alienation of goals, objectives, and assessments, and the nihilism of poststructuralist relativism and partialism, the questions Beach and Caraballo pursue provide educators with classroom models and practices and a language for crafting a new vision of the English language arts classroom. --David Bloome, Professor Emeritus of Literacy Education, The Ohio State University, USA

Author Information

Richard Beach is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, USA. Limarys Caraballo is Associate Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA.

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