Adventurous Thinking

Fostering Students' Rights to Read and Write in Secondary ELA Classrooms

Mollie V. Blackburn

• Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780814100356
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Grounded in NCTE's position statements "The Students' Right to Read" and "NCTE Beliefs about the Students' Right to Write, " this book focuses on high school English language arts classes, drawing from the work of seven teachers from across the country to illustrate how advocating for students' rights to read and write can be revolutionary work.Drawing from the work of high school teachers across the country, Adventurous Thinking illustrates how advocating for students' rights to read and write can be revolutionary work. Ours is a conflicted time: the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, for instance, run parallel with increasingly hostile attitudes toward immigrants and prescriptive K–12 curricula, including calls to censor texts. Teachers who fight to give their students the tools and opportunities to read about and write on topics of their choice and express ideas that may be controversial are, in editor Mollie V. Blackburn's words, "revolutionary artists, and their teaching is revolutionary art." The teacher chapters focus on high school English language arts classes that engaged with topics such as immigration, linguistic diversity, religious diversity, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, interrogating privilege, LGBTQ people, and people with physical disabilities and mental illness. Following these accounts is an interview with Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give, and an essay by Millie Davis, former director of NCTE's Intellectual Freedom Center. The closing essay reflects on provocative curriculum and pedagogy, criticality, community, and connections, as they get taken up in the book and might get taken up in the classrooms of readers. The book is grounded in foundational principles from NCTE's position statements The Students' Right to Read and NCTE Beliefs about the Students' Right to Write that underlie these contributors' practices, principles that add up to one committed declaration: Literacy is every student's right.

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• The Students' Right to Read
• NCTE Beliefs about the Students' Right to Write
• Part I................... Introduction: Revolutionary Teaching- Ensuring Students' Rights to Read and Write
• Part II................... Revolutionary Artists: Teachers' Accounts and Reflections
• Chapter 1............. Journalism as a Way to Foster Students' Rights to Read and Write about Immigration
• Chapter 2............. Linguistic Diversity: Strengthening Our Learning Communities
• Chapter 3............. Danger of Perpetuating Stereotypes: Muslim Students' Rights to Literacy in the English Classroom
• Chapter 4............. Black Lives Matter: Disrupting Oppression by Identifying Hidden Narratives in the English Language Arts Classroom
• Chapter 5............. Resistance, Reception, Race, and Rurality: Teaching Moncanonical Texts in a White, Conservative Montana Context
• Chapter 6............. High School Students' Rights to Read and Write as and about LGBTQ People
• Chapter 7............. Asking the Right Questions: Bringing Disability Studies into the High School Classroom
• Part III................. Supporting the Work of Teachers
• Chapter 8............. An Interview with Angie Thomas
• Chapter 9............. Protecting Your Students' Rights to Read and Write and Yours to Teach
• Chapter 10........... Adventurous Thinking: Provocative Curriculum and Pedagogy, Criticality, Community, and Connections
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index
• Editor
• Contributors