Overview
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.
About Principles in Practice
Books 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.
This book title, Adventurous Thinking (Fostering Students' Rights to Read and Write in Secondary ELA Classrooms), ISBN: 9780814100714, by Mollie V. Blackburn, published by National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (May 22, 2019) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
Unlike Amazon and other retailers who may also offer Adventurous Thinking (Fostering Students' Rights to Read and Write in Secondary ELA Classrooms) books on their website, we specialize in large quantities and provide personal service, from trusted, experienced, friendly people in Portland, Oregon. We offer a Price Match Guarantee, and QuickQuote form, to make purchasing quick and easy.
Prefer to work with a human being when you order Adventurous Thinking (Fostering Students' Rights to Read and Write in Secondary ELA Classrooms) books in bulk? Our Book Specialists are standing by Monday-Friday 8-5 PST, ready to help!