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This chapter reflects on the author's unexpected responses to Young Adult (YA) literature as a cathartic and healing experience. It also focuses on the role of YA literature in reaching the emotional needs of both students and educators as they face their own buried trauma. It is necessary for educators to understand the role trauma plays in the classroom and to develop ways to broach these difficult subjects within a structured lesson to support the development of student resilience. Additionally, it is necessary for educators to challenge their own beliefs surrounding the selection of appropriate texts for classroom use and select texts that reflect student experiences. Through this chapter, the reader will gain practical ways to embrace YA literature in the classroom, as well as practical ways to grow through difficult life experiences and healthy methods to foster resilience in educational spaces.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a protocol for developing students into social actors using young adult (YA) literature in social studies. The world-changing through social action protocol (WSAP) utilizes five recursive steps (P2TripleS): problem posing, problem history, systems thinking, solutions thinking and social action. WSAP is designed to provide secondary social studies teachers with tools to create thematic units, activities and discussions about difficult current issues, such as school violence, bullying, death, or suicide. The purpose of WSAP is to help teachers incorporate strategies to encourage civic action for social justice.

In this paper, WSAP is applied to the YA novel Violent Ends (Hutchinson et al., 2015), which describes a school shooting and its effects from multiple perspectives.

This paper discusses the use of the theoretical framework, WSAP and its five recursive steps (P2TripleS). The protocol developed is a helpful tool for teachers to integrate ELA and Social Studies curriculum in a student-centered, project-based environment while addressing the C3 and Common Core State Standards. The protocol is applied to the YA novel, Violent Ends (Hutchinson et al., 2015) and includes questions and strategies that guide teachers and students to critically think about democratic action and gun violence.

The specific steps of the WSAP protocol will be demonstrated with Violent Ends, providing example activities from this book for practitioners.

This paper is the first to apply the WSAP with a YA text.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore how preservice teachers in a young adult literature course critically conceptualize discussions in school spaces about race and police/community relations; and to understand the constraints and affordances of using the young adult (YA) novel, All American Boys, as a critical literacy tool for discussing race and police/community relations.

This qualitative exploratory case study (Stake, 1995) investigated 24 pre-service teachers in two university YA literature courses as they read and discussed All American Boys. Thematic analysis consisted of open coding through the theoretical lenses of critical literacy and critical race theory.

Pre-service English language arts teachers largely thought that while race and police relations was important and the YA book was powerful, it was too political. Their fears about what might happen lead to privileging the role of neutrality as the desired goal for teachers when tackling difficult conversations about racial injustice in America. Although students made some shifts in terms of moving from neutral to more critical stances, three sub-themes of neutrality were predominant: a need for both sides of the story, the view that all beliefs are valid and the belief that we are all humans therefore all lives matter equally.

A search at the time of this study yielded few research tackling racial injustice and community/police relations through YA literature in the classroom. This study is important as stories of police brutality and racism are all too common and adolescents are too often the victims.

The purpose of this study was to challenge pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) assumptions about youth readers, the researcher in this study invited a group of three seventh-grade students to attend a multicultural young adult (YA) literature class designed for PSTs at a large mid-western university.

Using qualitative methodology, the researcher strove to answer the following question: How can instructors use youth literature and teaching practices to shift the way that youth readers are perceived – especially marginalized youth – within educational institutions? Data sources included participant observation and field notes, semi-structured interviews with participating seventh-grade students, discussion artifacts, lesson plans and discussion transcripts.

The author found that the seventh-grade students in this study shared intertextual connections and offered critical readings of text and the world that had the potential to challenge PSTs’ notions of how YA literature can, and should, be used in classrooms. Importantly, the adolescent students were also able to see themselves as competent participants in collegiate dialogue around texts.

Much research has been done on the value of giving PSTs experiences in school field experiences, but this research highlights the power of interactions between adolescents and PSTs in a university classroom.

This paper aims to connect disability studies to multicultural education. This paper advances equity discussions and positions educators as interrupters of deficit dialogues that exclude students with social/emotional/behavioural (SEB) differences, disrupting the ableism that is present in schools.

The authors studied current children’s and young adult literature with representation of SEB differences to develop a three-dimensional model for educators. The authors synthesized interdisciplinary fields to provide educators guidance for planning, teaching and assessing student learning using such books.

The 3-D Model: Disrupting Deficit Dialogues with Literature (3-D model) is a framework that educators can use to evaluate SEB differences representation in books, deliver instruction that supports students’ critical thinking and assess student gains in literacy and social–emotional learning. This tool helps educators develop inclusive, interdisciplinary instruction, embedding social–emotional learning competencies in literacy lessons that disrupt deficit dialogues about SEB differences.

While other frameworks exist for evaluating books portraying characters with differences, they are not solely focussed on the assets of children with social/emotional/ behavioural differences. The 3-D model supports interdisciplinary instruction to meet mandated standards, incorporating concepts from disability studies in education into multicultural education. There is little research or guidance for educators in this field. However, challenging assumptions about disability and societal norms foregrounds possibilities for change as a foundation of multiculturalism.

Early childhood and early elementary are key times when children develop internal and external antifat attitudes; thus, it is necessary to better understand the available children’s literature around fatness.This paper aims to examine children's picture books with fat protagonists to better understand the current landscape of children's literature. Drawing on relevant literature around fat characters and the fat studies movement, this critical content analysis considers five children’s books featuring fat protagonists.

This study uses critical content analysis to analyze texts featuring fat protagonists, including two rounds of initial reading and analysis. Using lenses of critical literacy and critical multicultural analysis, the author looks for common themes, silences and absences in the texts, images and peritext.

This paper identifies themes of characters initially internalizing antifatness, then pushing back against antifat bias toward existing with joy and without stigma. Several of these texts even draw on the history of fat activism, highlighting societal critique and a potential activist component of children’s literature with fat protagonists.

The study has a small number of books, due to the limited number of texts that fit the study parameters.

The paper concludes with examples of scaffolding for teachers and parents to have conversations with young children about antifat bias while also acknowledging notable absences, particularly boy protagonists.

These themes illustrate the power of young children to push back against antifat bias and critique oppressive social structures.

There have been very few studies looking at antifatness in children’s picture books. With more books with fat protagonists coming out in the 2020s, this study offers an understanding of the themes present, while also emphasizing the need for an intersectional approach to literature with fat protagonists.

This paper aims to draw from work in the field of English that questions the “limits of critique” (Felski, 2015) in order to consider the limits of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction. The study focuses on the relational and affective demands that resistant reading places on readers and texts.

Drawing from post-critical (Felski, 2015) and surface (Best and Marcus, 2009) reading practices in the field of English, the authors perform analyses of two recent articles that illustrate critical literacy approaches to literature instruction, drawing attention to the ways the resistant reading practices outlined in each article reflect Felski’s description of critique.

The authors’ readings of two frameworks of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction produce two key findings: first, in emphasizing resistant readings, critical literacy asks readers to take up a detective-like orientation to literature, treating texts as suspects; second, resistant reading practices promote a specific set of affective orientations toward a text, asking readers to cultivate skepticism and vigilance.

While the authors do not dismiss the importance of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction, the study makes room for other relational and affective orientations to literature, especially those that might encourage readers to listen to – and be surprised by – a text. By describing critical literacy through the lens of Felski’s work on critique, the authors aim to open up new possibilities for surprising encounters with literature.

In the novel, The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers probes the American malaise through the longings of a young adolescent girl. Twelve‐year‐old Frankie no longer sees the world as round and inviting as a school globe. No, the world is huge and cracked and turning a thousand miles an hour. Indeed, the world seems separate from herself. In the midst of chaos, Frankie sees her brother's upcoming wedding as a chance to feel connected, to feel that she matters. The story focuses on Frankie's efforts to be a “member of the wedding,” as she recognizes, “they are the we of me.”

The purpose of this study is to investigate the needs of potential end-users of a database dedicated to Swedish lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) literature (e.g. prose, poetry, drama, graphic novels/comics, and illustrated books), in order to inform the development of a database, search interface functionalities, and an LGBTQI thesaurus for fiction.

A web questionnaire was distributed in autumn 2021 to potential end-users. The questions covered people's reasons for reading LGBTQI fiction, ways of finding LGBTQI fiction, experience of searching for LGBTQI fiction, usual search elements applied, latest search for LGBTQI fiction, desired subjects to search for, and ideal search functionalities.

The 101 completed questionnaires showed that most respondents found relevant literature through social media or friends and that most obtained copies of literature from a library. Regarding desirable search functionalities, most respondents would like to see suggestions for related terms to support broader search results (i.e. higher recall). Many also wanted search support that would enable retrieving more specific results based on narrower terms when too many results are retrieved (i.e. higher precision). Over half would also appreciate the option to browse by hierarchically arranged subjects.

This study is the first to show how readers of LGBTQI fiction in Sweden search for and obtain relevant literature. The authors have identified end-user needs that can inform the development of a new database and a thesaurus dedicated to LGBTQI fiction.