This book illustrates how teachers can draw upon young adult literature to facilitate students’ social action. Each chapter centers on one novel that represents a contemporary topic including police brutality, women’s rights, ecojustice, and bullying. In each, authors provide pre-, during-, and after reading strategies for teaching that connect the social issues in the texts to students’ lives and to the world around them. They then offer a multitude of avenues for student action, emphasizing the need to move readers from understanding and awareness to asserting their own agency and capacities to effect change in their local, national, and global communities. In addition to methods for scaffolding students’ analysis of texts and topics, authors also offer a plethora of additional resources such as documentaries, canonical companions for study, connected music, and supplementary lesson plans.
Ashley S. Boyd is an Assistant Professor of English Education at Washington State University where she teaches courses on English methods, young adult literature, and critical theories and pedagogies. A former secondary English teacher, Ashley’s research focuses on practicing teachers’ social justice pedagogies and their critical content knowledge and explores how young adult literature is an avenue for cultivating students’ critical literacies. Janine J. Darragh is an Associate Professor of Literacy and English as a Second Language at University of Idaho where she teaches courses on secondary literacy, young adult literature, and ESL. Her research focuses on sociocultural and social justice issues in teaching and learning.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Bullying
Chapter 2: Global Poverty
Chapter 3: Mental Health
Chapter 4: Gender
Chapter 5: Human Trafficking
Chapter 6: Refugee Crisis
Chapter 7: Women’s Rights
Chapter 8: Social Class Disparities in the United States
