English in Middle and Secondary Classrooms: Creative and Critical Advice from Canada’s Teacher Educators

Editors: Kedrick James, Teresa M. Dobson and Carl Leggo.

Just Published!

From Pearson Education Canada:
English in Middle and Secondary Classrooms: Creative and Critical Advice from Canada’s Teacher Educators presents a variety of teaching strategies and resources to help educators create relevant and rewarding English classes. It contains numerous short essays on a wide variety of topics written by contributors from across Canada and from a variety of teaching backgrounds. The authors offer practical pedagogical suggestions, theoretical frames, anecdotal experiences, and background resources to plan and deliver engaging English lessons. Reflecting the current areas of concern in ELA education, each reading highlights the many possibilities for enhancing creativity and critical engagement in classroom activities, adjusting to rapid changes in technology, how to best incorporate diverse student needs, and assessing with standardized testing.

I was delighted to contribute a chapter in this book in response to a question posed: How must our approach to teaching adolescent literature change in order to engage the complex needs of ‘at-risk’ students? I collaborated with Lambton-Kent Secondary School student Tim Ludwig, and Thames Valley District School Board Teacher Danika Barker. Here is a few lines from the opening of our chapter:

‘At-risk’ students need ‘risk-taking’ teachers. In this chapter, I engage Tim Ludwig (a 17 year old ‘at risk student’) and Danika Barker (an innovative, risk-taking secondary school English teacher) to consider how new approaches to teaching Adolescent Literature engage the complex needs of at-risk students. We met at a TEDxOntarioEd event, and found synergy in our diverse talks about what motivates us. Our shared enthusiasm toward disrupting a cycle that perpetuates thinking about learners in terms of deficits, diagnoses and remediation has led us to look more closely at multiliteracies pedagogies and how they may provide an approach that moves educators from pathologizing practices (Shields, Bishop & Mazawi, 2005) toward pedagogies that are asset-oriented (Heydon & Iannacci, 2008). Our goal is to provoke teachers to adjust their “beliefs about literacy, text, literature, reading, and writing that are grounded historically within the field of English and language arts teaching and learning” (O’Brien, 2003, np) in ways that create inviting, engaging spaces where literacy learning thrives for all students.