National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) – förlag

Teacher, researcher, and consultant Amy Benjamin challenges the idea of “skill and drill” grammar in the second edition of this lively, engaging, and immensely practical guide. 

Does grammar instruction have to elicit moans and groans from students and teachers alike? Only when it’s taught the old-fashioned way: as a series of rules to follow and errors to “fix” that have little or no connection to practical application or real-world writing.

Benjamin’s enlightened view of grammar is grounded in linguistics and teaches us how to make informed decisions about teaching grammar—how to move beyond fixing surface errors to teaching how grammar can be used as the building blocks of sentences to create meaning. By using sentence patterns, mapping, visuals, and manipulatives, Benjamin presents an approach to grammar instruction that is suitable for a variety of student populations.

Although she doesn’t advocate for teaching to the test, Benjamin acknowledges the pressures students face when taking high-stakes tests such as the SAT and ACT. Included is a chapter on how to improve students’ editing skills to help prepare them for the short-answer portion of these tests.

In this sequel to English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s), editor Bruce McComiskey and contributors from a range of disciplines propose seven principles to reimagine English studies for increased relevance in an increasingly diverse and globalized world.

While social values outside of academia are changing from nationalism to globalization, much of English studies remains entrenched in nationalist discourses. 

From literature and theory to linguistics, writing, and rhetoric, English Studies Reimagined argues that English studies must shift from a limited national orientation to a more global and cosmopolitan one in order to remain culturally and academically relevant to students today.

McComiskey introduces seven principles to reimagine English Studies for increased relevance: 

Each chapter explores a different discipline within English studies from the perspective of difference: linguistics by Jacquelyn Rahman, rhetoric and composition by Victor Villanueva, creative writing by Sarah Sandman, literature and literary criticism by Richard C. Taylor, critical theory and cultural studies by Jeffrey J. Williams, and English education by Tonya B. Perry. All play vital and distinct but interrelated roles in this proposed shift toward a globally oriented English studies.

In Growing Writers, veteran teacher educator Anne Elrod Whitney explores how the principles defined in NCTE’s Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing position statement can support high school writers and teachers of writing through knowledge and a conscious search for meaning in our writing activities. 

When principles guide our teaching, we can better understand our teaching purposes, make decisions about approaches and content, vet ideas supplied by others, and grow as teachers of writing. As part of the Writing in Today’s Classrooms strand of the Principles in Practice imprint, the book includes snapshots from high school teachers working in a variety of settings who illustrate how their own principled classroom practices have helped both them and their students to grow, whether they are writing for advocacy, learning the importance of revision, experimenting with new audiences, or embracing the vulnerability and the power of writing. 

The principles come alive through the author’s analysis and friendly discussion and the contributing teachers’ everyday practices. Whitney’s compassionate support and encouragement of active, ongoing learning is supplemented by further-reading lists and an annotated bibliography of both print and digital texts to accompany us on our journeys to ever-greater effectiveness as writers and teachers of writing.

Winner of the 2024 Best Book Award from the Council of Writing Program Administrators 

An expansive look at the discipline of writing studies, with a focus on serving and supporting first-year writing students and instructors at open access institutions.

There is a huge gap between perceptions of the field of writing studies and the material realities of those who teach in it. Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching argues for the centering of the field’s research and service on first-year writing, particularly the “new majority” of college students (who are more diverse than ever before) and those who teach them.

The book features the voices of first-year writing instructors at a two-year, open-access, multi-campus institution whose students are consistently underrepresented in discussions of the discipline. Drawing from a study of 78 two-year college student writers and an analysis of nearly two decades of issues of the major journals in the field of writing studies, Holly Hassel and Cassandra Phillips sketch out a reimagined vision for writing studies that roots the scholarship, research, and service in the discipline squarely within the changing material realities of contemporary college writing instruction.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series

In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

An insightful and informative guide for many of the situations and issues high school English Language Arts teachers face every day.

From four veteran teacher educators, On the Case in the English Language Arts Classroom offers twenty case narratives as well as a format for discussion, professional resources that can inform decisions, and a guide to constructing new case narratives that can expand the possibilities for developing powerful problem-solving strategies.

Being a high school English teacher is both rewarding and difficult. Although teacher education programs try to be thorough, they can’t prepare preservice teachers for every situation that might arise. For instance:

On the Case in the English Language Arts Classroom provides teachers at any point in their career the opportunity to analyze potential situations and problems that commonly confront teachers through case studies that prompt extensive, stimulating discussion and invite written responses.

Rob and Amanda Montgomery provide practical guidance and activities for K-12 teachers to get students out of the classroom and writing in real-world settings.

A Place to Write provides a comprehensive view of how place-based writing can be incorporated into the K–12 curriculum for a range of often transformative student writing experiences and classroom purposes, offering both a rationale for moving students out of the classroom to write in real-world spaces and a how-to guide to help teachers develop their own place-based writing activities. Each chapter explores opportunities for writing in a different real-world setting such as museums, schools, public places, natural places, and even virtual places by detailing a range of practical classroom activities in a variety of commonly taught genres.

Each activity is accompanied by considerations for teachers who may want to forge interdisciplinary connections and/or add authentic audiences to their students’ work. Rob and Amanda Montgomery also suggest adaptations and scaffolding for students with special needs and English language learners.

While encouraging environmental advocacy, the book also encompasses issues of equity and social justice, school safety, and culture and identity, as well as accessible ideas for teaching common genres such as personal narrative, argumentation, and authentic forms of inquiry.

Rhetorics of Overcoming addresses the in/accessibility of writing classroom and writing center practices for disabled and nondisabled student writers, exploring how rhetorics of overcoming—the idea that disabled students must overcome their disabilities in order to be successful—manifest in writing studies scholarship and practices.

Allison Harper Hitt argues that rewriting rhetorics of overcoming as narratives of “coming over” is one way to overcome ableist pedagogical standards. Whereas rhetorics of overcoming rely on medical-model processes of diagnosis, disclosure, cure, and overcoming for individual students, coming over involves valuing disability and difference and challenging systemic issues of physical and pedagogical inaccessibility. 

Hitt calls for developing understandings of disability and difference that move beyond accommodation models in which students are diagnosed and remediated, instead working collaboratively—with instructors, administrators, consultants, and students themselves—to craft multimodal, universally designed writing pedagogies that meet students’ access needs.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series:In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Salt of the Earth is an autoethnography and cultural rhetorics case study that examines white supremacy in the author’s hometown of Grand Saline, Texas, a community long marred by its racist culture. 

James Chase Sanchez investigates the rhetoric of white supremacy by exploring three unique rhetorical processes―identity construction, storytelling, and silencing―as they relate to an umbrella act: the rhetoric of preservation. 

Sanchez argues that we need to better understand the productions of white supremacy as a complex rhetorical act and that in order to create a more well-rounded view of cultural rhetorics as a subfield, we need more analyses of the way cultures of the oppressor survive and thrive. 

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series:In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Edited by Tom Liam Lynch, this collection of essays drawn from NCTE’s many journals provides an excellent starting point for teachers who want to bring critical media literacy into their K-12 and college classrooms.

Critical media literacy is not a single star burning brightly in the night sky. It is more like a constellation, a collection of stars that tell a story about how educators engage with young people through an array of communicative modes in the spirit of inquiry, society, and action. 

About the Special Issue series:Most teachers and students across the country are grappling with several important issues. We hear from many educators who are looking for compelling and engaging approaches racial literacy, critical media literacy, and trauma-informed teaching. 

NCTE is responding to these needs with Special Issues, a series of books designed to directly address these pressing topics in K-12 and college classrooms today. The first volumes collect content on these topics from across all of NCTE’s journals in one place, to make the most relevant material accessible and practical. 

Edited by expert practitioners in the field, each volume contains teaching tips to help implement these approaches in classrooms. 

Edited by Detra Price-Dennis, this first volume of Special Issues: Racial Literacy gathers some of the most compelling and practical recent articles across NCTE journals, addressing the importance of racial literacy and its implications for curriculum, pedagogy, and policy. 

There’s a great deal of uncertainty, discord, and increased volatility across a number of critical institutions in our society. Each day on social media and TV news outlets we read, listen to, and/or watch events unfold that are linked to political, economic, health, legal, and educational inequities that can be traced to racist ideologies and practices. Public schools across the country are being subjected to pending state legislation and new laws that seek to limit how race—among other markers of identity—can be taught in K–12 classrooms. 

Editor Detra Price-Dennis has curated this collection to show how teaching from a racial literacy perspective is in conversation with antiracist, culturally responsive, equity-oriented frameworks that uplift curriculum design and instructional strategies. These articles can help educators (re)imagine the classroom as a space that supports the development of racial literacy skills and practices with their students.

About the Special Issue series:Most teachers and students across the country are grappling with several important issues. We hear from many educators who are looking for compelling and engaging approaches racial literacy, critical media literacy, and trauma-informed teaching. 

NCTE is responding to these needs with Special Issues, a series of books designed to directly address these pressing topics in K-12 and college classrooms today. The first volumes collect content on these topics from across all of NCTE’s journals in one place, to make the most relevant material accessible and practical. 

Edited by expert practitioners in the field, each volume contains teaching tips to help implement these approaches in classrooms. 

This first volume of Special Issues: Trauma-Informed Teaching gathers some of the most compelling and practical recent articles across NCTE journals, addressing the importance of trauma-informed teaching and its recent developments in the field.

We live in a time that requires attention to trauma. Educators and students are learning how to move forward in this precarious time, which in many ways has amplified preexisting health, racial, economic, and educational inequalities. The pandemic has shaped us in ways we have yet to understand fully, but we know we must adapt and heal together. It is imperative that K-College educators not only consider trauma-informed teaching, but also healing-centered teaching practices. As we think through ways to support the most harmed people in our teaching and learning communities, we will move closer to a more equitable and just healing-centered profession.

Editor Sakeena Everett has curated this collection to show how to help K-College teachers integrate the most up-to-date approaches to trauma-informed teaching into their classroom environments. In this volume, you will find valuable insights, diverse perspectives, innovative and exciting pedagogies, as well as thought-provoking research methodologies that engage micro- and macro-level supports you need to get started today.

About the Special Issue series:Most teachers and students across the country are grappling with several important issues. We hear from many educators who are looking for compelling and engaging approaches racial literacy, critical media literacy, and trauma-informed teaching. 

NCTE is responding to these needs with Special Issues, a series of books designed to directly address these pressing topics in K-12 and college classrooms today. The first volumes collect content on these topics from across all of NCTE’s journals in one place, to make the most relevant material accessible and practical. 

Edited by expert practitioners in the field, each volume contains teaching tips to help implement these approaches in classrooms.

Teach Living Poets opens up the flourishing world of contemporary poetry to secondary teachers.

It is designed to give advice on reading contemporary poetry, discovering new poets, and inviting living poets into the classroom, as well as sharing sample lessons, writing prompts, and ways to become an engaged member of a professional learning community. 

The #TeachLivingPoets approach, which has grown out of the vibrant movement and community founded by high school teacher Melissa Alter Smith and been codeveloped with poet and scholar Lindsay Illich, offers rich opportunities for students to improve critical reading and writing, opportunities for self-expression and social-emotional learning, and, perhaps the most desirable outcome, the opportunity to fall in love with language and discover (or renew) their love of reading. The many poems included in Teach Living Poets are representative of the diverse poets writing today.

Drawing on both the production aspects of theater and the generative learning elements of drama, Theater, Drama, and Reading provides language arts teachers the tools and resources they need to help students transform text from print to interaction and deeper understanding.

Judith Freeman Garey establishes a simple framework for how to read as an actor who builds characters’ lives, a set designer who constructs context, and a director who generates action. In the same way that theater artists engage in a rehearsal process to transform printed words into a world of people, space, sound, and action for the stage, readers can learn a modified version of this process to make text visible and concrete, unlocking its meaning. 

This significant and practical new resource for all language arts teachers details the components of these reading strategies, provides step-by-step examples from classroom practice, and clearly demonstrates how the strategies achieve the Common Core State Standards. Additionally, the book defines a unique approach to teaching dramatic literature, features a short overview of additional popular classroom drama strategies to engage students with written text, and integrates practical suggestions to convert all these strategies to online instruction.

In Using Film to Unlock Textual Literacy: A Teacher’s Guide, Robert Bryant Crisp explores strategies for using film study and filmmaking to help students engage in entirely new ways with both print and digital texts. 

Struggling to help students engage with print texts? 

Looking for ways to help them learn to analyze texts deeply in a hands-on, differentiated, and real-world environment? 

High school teacher Robert Bryant Crisp explores how film can be read in much the same way as print texts—and can be every bit as rewarding. We are surrounded by screens, and we understand film viscerally. It’s a language we all comprehend, from which we can make meaning, even when we may not understand the technical aspects of how that process happens. And telling stories via the medium of film requires every bit of the forethought and intent that constructing print text requires. 

From basic team building, storyboarding, and filming-with-your-phone-camera activities to deeper dives into adapting texts, making directorial choices, and guiding audience response through texts, Crisp proves that you can teach film study even without specialized training. 

Texts incorporated into lessons include: “Casey at the Bat,” 42, E. T., “Everyday Use,” Othello, Edward Scissorhands, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” Unbroken, and more. Resources include a list of film vocabulary, observation charts and rubrics, storyboard templates, and sample film technique assessments.

What Works in Writing Instruction offers the best of what is currently known about effective writing instruction to help teachers help middle and high school students develop as writers.

"What works?"

As teachers, it’s a question we often ask ourselves about teaching writing, and it often summarizes other, more specific questions we have:

Using teacher-friendly language and classroom examples, Deborah Dean helps answer these questions. She looks closely at instructional practices supported by a broad range of research and weaves them together into accessible recommendations that can inspire teachers to find what works for their own classrooms and students. 

Initially based on the Carnegie Institute’s influential Writing Next report, this second edition of What Works in Writing Instruction looks at more types of research that have been conducted in the decade since the publication of that first research report. The new research rounds out its list of recommended practices and is designed to help teachers apply the findings to their unique classroom environments. We all must find the right mix of practices and tasks for our own students, and this book offers the best of what is currently known about effective writing instruction to help teachers help students develop as writers.

A friendly and practical guide for teaching English grammar in the context of real, lived language.

As most teachers of English now know, research shows that teaching grammar in the traditional way—through worksheets, memorizing definitions, and diagramming sentences—doesn’t work, and that teaching grammar in the context of reading and writing is a better approach.

People who understand language can make things happen. That is the point of grammar/language teaching. Not definitions. Not terminology. Language.

Veteran teacher educator Deborah Dean addresses the realities and challenges of grammar instruction with practical examples and experiences, including:

Dean’s straightforward approach uncomplicates the task of teaching grammar in context, allowing her—and us—to share the excitement and wonder to be found in the study of language.

How might writing instructors dedicated to community-writing or service-learning courses take into account and even mobilize the lived experiences of all their students? 

Veteran community-writing instructor Glenn Hutchinson charts the history of his understanding that the conventional goal of such courses, to engage students in their communities and help them become more active citizens, doesn’t acknowledge the reality of the many college students who are prohibited from becoming US citizens, despite long years of residence in this country. 

Writing Accomplices with Student Immigrant Rights Organizers argues for a pedagogical shift toward centering the public-writing classroom on students’ work as organizers and rhetoricians. Instead of focusing only on community partnerships, the writing classroom can foreground the work of student organizers and how they can better inform the field’s teaching practices. Each chapter focuses on students’ rhetorical skills through petitions, op-eds, and campaigns to stop deportations.

Hutchinson emphasizes teachers’ responsibility to act in solidarity with immigrant students, pointing to a new role for the writing teacher in changing anti-immigrant and white supremacist laws and policies.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) SeriesIn this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

In Nonfiction Writers Dig Deep, some of today’s most celebrated writers for children share essays that describe a critical part of the informational writing process that is often left out of classroom instruction. 

To craft engaging nonfiction, professional writers choose topics that fascinate them and explore concepts and themes that reflect their passions, personalities, beliefs, and experiences in the world. By scrutinizing the information they collect to make their own personal meaning, they create distinctive books that delight as well as inform. 

In addition to essays from mentor authors, the book includes a wide range of tips, tools, teaching strategies, and activity ideas from editor Melissa Stewart to help students (1) choose a topic, (2) focus that topic by identifying a core idea, theme, or concept, and (3) analyze their research to find a personal connection. By adding a piece of themselves to their drafts, students will learn to craft rich, unique prose. 

Featuring essays by Sarah Albee, Chris Barton, Donna Janell Bowman, Mary Kay Carson, Nancy Castaldo, Jason Chin, Lesa Cline-Ransome, Seth Fishman, Candace Fleming, Kelly Milner Halls, Deborah Heiligman, Susan Hood, Gail Jarrow, Lita Judge, Jess Keating, Barbara Kerley, Heather Lang, Cynthia Levinson, Michelle Markel, Carla Killough McClafferty, Heather Montgomery, Patricia Newman, Elizabeth Partridge, Baptiste Paul, Miranda Paul, Teresa Robeson, Mara Rockliff, Barb Rosenstock, Laura Purdie Salas, Anita Sanchez, April Pulley Sayre, Steve Sheinkin, Ray Anthony Shepard, Anita Silvey, Traci Sorell, Tanya Lee Stone, Jennifer Swanson, Stephen R. Swinburne, Don Tate, Laurie Ann Thompson, Pamela Turner, Patricia Valdez, Sandra Neil Wallace, Laurie Wallmark, Jennifer Ward, Carole Boston Weatherford, Lee Wind, Paula Yoo, and Karen Romano Young.

This fun and practical book gives teachers of grades 3–5 teachers both the research and the day-to-day practical activities to expand and empower their students’ vocabulary. 

Upper elementary students will develop a deeper understanding of how the English language works, enrich their vocabularies, and improve their reading and writing skills through the information and lessons provided by veteran educators Mary Jo Fresch and David L. Harrison. 

Each chapter presents definitions and playful examples (in poetry and prose) to teach: 

Practical lessons and activities for each category will engage students in joyful practice. A final chapter offers insights into language choices by eight well-known children’s poets and authors, including two former US Young People’s Poets Laureate—Kenn Nesbitt and Margarita Engle—and world-renowned Jane Yolen.

Already Readers and Writers: Honoring Students'' Rights to Read and Write in the Middle Grade Classroom is meant to help all middle school educators encourage their students to build literate lives both within the classroom and well beyond it.

Veteran middle school teacher Jennifer Ochoa has brought together middle school teachers and teacher leaders, children’s author and We Need Diverse Books cofounder Ellen Oh, children’s literature scholar Kristin McIlhagga, reading and writing workshop teacher-author Linda Rief, and censorship expert Millie Davis to examine current middle school literacy practices that support students’ rights to read and write.

By showcasing their experiences and activities, and positioning NCTE policy statements—The Students'' Right to Read and NCTE Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write—as foundational guiding documents, Ochoa and her colleagues prove that even in today’s standards-driven environment, authentic reading and writing practices can create literacy-rich middle school classrooms.

As a bonus, teachers who don’t have strong support in their schools to implement these practices will find a myriad of suggestions for developing a virtual personal learning network—a grassroots professional development tailored to their needs and interests—that will support them in their efforts to help kids as readers and writers.

About Principles in PracticeBooks in the Principles in Practice imprint offer teachers concrete illustrations of effective classroom practices based in NCTE research briefs and policy statements.

Each book discusses the research on a specific topic, links the research to an NCTE brief or policy statement, and then demonstrates how those principles come alive in practice: by showcasing actual classroom practices that demonstrate the policies in action; by talking about research in practical, teacher-friendly language; and by offering teachers possibilities for rethinking their own practices in light of the ideas presented in the books.

Rethinking Reading in College argues for more systematic attention to the role of reading comprehension in college, as a necessary step in addressing the inequities in student achievement that otherwise increase over time.

Synthesizing theory from literacy scholars with strategies derived from classroom inquiry projects, and through a critique of the philosophy behind the Common Core State Standards, Arlene Fish Wilner examines the needs of college-bound high school students and interrogates the nature of “remediation” in college. Arguing that when supported by rhetorical-reading assignments, students in all first-year writing classes can and should explore complex and enduring texts. 

Addressing both composition and reading across the curriculum, Wilner demonstrates how faculty in all disciplines and at all curricular levels can improve student outcomes by first deliberately inhabiting the persona of novices, rethinking their assumptions about what students know and can do as apprentices in a field.

She also illustrates the limitations of the literary vs. nonliterary text binary through a study of the demands posed by To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel commonly taught in both high school and college. An outline for a two-semester first-year general education course and examples of writing-to-read assignments from a range of disciplines are adaptable across subject areas and institutions.

Even from the earliest grades, children have the rights to read and write—not just in dominant American English, but also in their own languages and dialects.

Young children make meaning and make sense from the earliest years. They read facial expressions, engage in interactions, and read symbols across a variety of named languages. Historically narrow definitions of reading and writing, however, often prevent children of color and immigrants from having access to texts that reflect their diverse cultures and backgrounds. Classroom materials also often don''t reflect the growing majority of multilingual children of color, compromising their right to access texts that reflect their cultural values, language practices, and historical legacies.

Promoting equitable, inclusive, and plural understandings of literacy, Mariana Souto-Manning and eight New York City public school teachers explore how elementary teachers can welcome into their classrooms the voices, values, language practices, stories, and experiences of their students who have been minoritized by dominant curricula, cultivating reading and writing experiences that showcase children''s varied skills and rich practices.

Readers are invited to enter classrooms where teachers have engaged with the principles detailed in two NCTE position statements--NCTE Beliefs about the Students'' Right to Write and The Students'' Right to Read--in the pursuit of justice. Collectively, their experiences show that when teachers view the communities their students come from as assets to and in school, children not only thrive academically, but they also gain confidence in themselves as learners and develop a critical consciousness. Together, stepping into their power, they seek to right historical and contemporary wrongs as they commit to changing the world.

About Principles in PracticeBooks in the Principles in Practice imprint offer teachers concrete illustrations of effective classroom practices based in NCTE research briefs and policy statements.

Each book discusses the research on a specific topic, links the research to an NCTE brief or policy statement, and then demonstrates how those principles come alive in practice: by showcasing actual classroom practices that demonstrate the policies in action; by talking about research in practical, teacher-friendly language; and by offering teachers possibilities for rethinking their own practices in light of the ideas presented in the books.

Making Middle School is the story of eighth-grade English teacher Steve Fulton and science teacher Tiffany Green’s explorations of the intersections between critical literacy and science through maker spaces alongside their students. 

Steve and Tiffany, with thinking partner Cindy Urbanski, use the idea of make to center student learning in their classrooms as well as to democratize learning, back-loading English and science standards while front-loading the current focus on STEAM. 

Making—following one’s own desire to create—is based on principles of connected learning, where students work in community to challenge themselves, to be creative, and to wonder about their world. Making represents a pathway directed by the learner and allowed to unfold organically, without a scripted route or destination. By looking up close at the real work of teachers and students, Fulton and Urbanski illustrate the rich and real applications of a make-based approach in today’s middle school classrooms.

Named one of the 20 Best New Rhetoric Books to Read in 2021 by BookAuthority

Winner of the 2021 Vision Award from the Coalition for Community Writing 

Humanities scholar Aja Y. Martinez makes a compelling case for counterstory as methodology in rhetoric and writing studies through the well-established framework of critical race theory (CRT), reviewing first the counterstory work of Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell, and Patricia J. Williams, whom she terms counterstory exemplars. Delgado, Bell, and Williams, foundational critical race theorists working in the respective counterstory genres of narrated dialogue, fantasy/allegory, and autobiography, have set precedent for others who would research and compose with this method.

Arguing that counterstory provides opportunities for marginalized voices to contribute to conversations about dominant ideology, Martinez applies racial and feminist rhetorical criticism to the rich histories and theories established through counterstory genres, all the while demonstrating how CRT theories and methods can inform teaching, research, and writing/publishing of counterstory.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) SeriesIn this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Writing Can Change Everything invites all of us to consider how the principles outlined in NCTE’s Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing position statement weave throughout the best practices on display as students write through creative self-expression, narrative, inquiry, and project-based learning. 

Identifying writing as central to what makes us human, editor and teacher educator Shelbie Witte has gathered a diverse group of middle school teacher-writers who open the doors of their classrooms to share their approaches to mentoring, modeling, and facilitating middle level writers as they explore their places within our world. 

Early adolescents might be physically and emotionally in flux, but they are also multidimensional, multitalented creatures of curiosity, always pushing the boundaries of discovery and possibility. The seven educators whose classrooms are showcased in this book know that being a writer is being part of the world, and they lead their students toward the understanding that writing makes a difference, both in their own lives and in the broader world. 

About Principles in PracticeBooks in the Principles in Practice imprint offer teachers concrete illustrations of effective classroom practices based in NCTE research briefs and policy statements.

Each book discusses the research on a specific topic, links the research to an NCTE brief or policy statement, and then demonstrates how those principles come alive in practice: by showcasing actual classroom practices that demonstrate the policies in action; by talking about research in practical, teacher-friendly language; and by offering teachers possibilities for rethinking their own practices in light of the ideas presented in the books.

D. Alexis Hart and Roger Thompson offer rich academic inquiry into the idea of “the veteran” as well as into ways that veteran culture has been fostered or challenged in writing classrooms, in writing centers, and in college communities more generally.

For good reasons, the rise of veterans studies has occurred within the discipline of writing studies, with its interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, pedagogy, and community outreach. Writing faculty are often a point of first contact with veteran students, and writing classrooms are by their nature the site of disclosures, providing opportunities to make connections and hear narratives that debunk the myth of the stereotypical combat veteran of popular culture. 

Presenting a more nuanced approach to understanding “the veteran” leads not only to more useful research, but also to more wide-ranging and significant scholarship and community engagement. Such an approach recognizes veterans as assets to the college campus, encourages institutions to customize their veterans programs and courses, and leads to more thoughtful engagement with veterans in the writing classroom.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) SeriesIn this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Through a mix of history, theory, and story, Anna Plemons explores the fate of the Arts in Corrections (AIC) program at New Folsom Prison in California in order to study prison education in general as well as the disciplinary goals of rhetoric and composition classrooms.

When viewed as a microcosm of the broader enterprise, the prison classroom highlights the way that composition and rhetoric as a discipline continues to make use of colonial ways of knowing and being that work against the decolonial intentions of the field. Plemons suggests that a truly decolonial turn in composition cannot be achieved as long as economic logics and rhetorics of individual transformation continue to be the default currency for ascribing value in prison writing programs specifically and in out-of-school writing communities more generally. Indigenous scholarship provides the theoretical basis for Plemons’s proposed intervention in the ways it both pushes back against individualized, economic assessments of value and describes design principles for research and pedagogy that are respectful, reciprocal, and relational. 

Beyond Progress in the Prison Classroom includes narrative selections from the author and current and former AIC participants, inviting readers into the lives of incarcerated authors and demonstrating the effects of relationality on prison-scholars, ultimately upending the misconception that these writers and their teachers exist apart from the web of relations beyond the prison walls. With contributions from incarcerated prison-scholars Ken Blackburn, Bryson L. Cole, Harry B. Grant Jr., Adam Hinds, Hung-Linh "Ronnie" Hoang, Andrew Molino, Michael L. Owens, Wayne Vaka, and Martin Williams.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) SeriesIn this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

A deep dive into the rich resources available for teaching Shakespeare’s plays, Bring on the Bard is for every high school teacher—early career to veteran—looking for new, hands-on activities to draw students of all ability levels into the work and world of Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare didn’t write his plays for readers; he wrote individual “cue scripts” for actors who hadn’t read the entire play but had to perform on the fly with almost no rehearsal. Those cue scripts have become the written form of his dramas, compiled originally in the First Folio of 1623. And the actors’ cues for meaning, emotion, and emphasis are still embedded in Shakespeare’s language, ripe for discovery by today’s students. 

Shakespeare’s plays rightly remain a staple of the ELA curriculum, but evolving standards and youth culture itself challenge teachers to put students—not a text—at the center of a reading experience in order to support diverse readers and learners.

How can we do this? 

Experienced educators Kevin Long and Mary T. Christel introduce us to the Folio technique, which builds on active drama approaches that position students to engage with a rich text through low-risk speaking and improvisation activities. Without requiring students to become actors, the Folio technique helps them to discover the clues the Bard built into his works that allow actors to efficiently understand their characters’ text, context, and subtext. Teachers can use excerpts from the First Folio along with a mass market paperback or digital edition of a play to help students get closer to Shakespeare’s intentions; understand the language, action, and emotions of the characters; and perhaps even explore the challenges the Bard’s modern editors face.

The book offers suggestions for using parallel text, graphic, and abridged editions of Shakespeare’s works, as well as activities using cue scripts and a variety of viewing experiences.