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The purpose of this paper is to examine youth literacy and writing practices in select, contemporary young adult literature (YAL), especially how and why literate activity is sponsored, negotiated or occluded by teachers and schools.

The authors position young adult fiction as case studies of youth composing in and out of school. Drawing on Stake's (1995) features of case study research in education, the authors present readings of Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero and The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy by Kate Hattemer that highlight particular problems and insights about youth literacy practices that are worth extended examination and reflection.

Both novels feature youth engaging in powerful literacy and writing practices across a range of modes to critically read and write their worlds. These particular texts – and other YAL featuring youth composing – offer teacher educators and pre-service teachers opportunities for critical reflection on their evolving stances on literacy instruction; identities as writing and literacy educators; and pedagogies that enable robust literate activity.

In the US educational context, teacher education programs are required to provide pre-service teachers numerous opportunities to observe and participate as teachers in public school classrooms. YAL offers a unique setting of experience that can be productively paired with more traditional field placements to complement pre-service writing teacher education. Reading YAL featuring youth composing can serve as a useful occasion of reflection on pedagogies that limit and/or make possible students’ meaningful engagement with words and the world.

This paper aims to argue for the curricular inclusion of youth-generated young adult literature (YAL) alongside canonical literature and adult-generated YAL. The authors support this argument with the results of a qualitative analysis of youth memoir published in The Best Teen Writing. They strive to inform the debate between educators who value memoir as part of the secondary curriculum and critics who question the ability of youth to write purposeful, meaningful narrative. Additionally, the authors also present memoir as a unique genre for youth to document and process adolescence, and for youth to speak to issues which they deem important.

Informed theoretically by the Youth Lens, which considers how texts reinforce and/or disrupt various figurations of adolescence and youth, this study uses a multistage qualitative analysis of 83 youth memoir published in nine volumes of the Best Teen Writing from 2010 to 2018. First, the authors conducted a Labovian plot analysis to consider what themes and topics were present as well as what this sample could teach us about youth. Next, they analyzed the sample for genre hallmarks specific to creative nonfiction and memoir to consider the question of quality of youth memoir.

The findings suggest that there is no typical adolescence and that youth are balancing complex, intersectional identities, which they write about skillfully through memoir. These findings directly contrast with critics of youth memoir. Rather than clichéd, the memoirs the authors analyzed show youth as intercultural, capable of thoughtful reflection, capturing the transitory state of their youth (knowing they are not children anymore and lightly speculating about their future), skillfully integrating memoir genre hallmarks, and recording important events and perspectives with appeal to a broader readership. Furthermore, these findings position youth memoir as worthy of curricular inclusion alongside adult-generated YAL.

If the critics of youth memoir are the loudest voices, youth memoir will be, at best, relegated as examples for writers rather than seen as valid additions to curricular canon. This work gives due credit to the quality of published youth memoir to showcase their potential for curricular and canonical addition. This study builds on smaller-scale case studies and personal accounts to make an argument for curricular inclusion of youth voices and youth memoir in the secondary canon.

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.

Purpose – To examine the results of requiring a book review podcast project within an Adolescent and Young Adult Literature (YAL) course in a teacher education program. This inquiry pays special attention to the ways in which sound can be used to elicit and evoke listener emotion, and enrich and expand pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) technological repertoires as they move forward as teachers in this digital era.

Design – This inquiry into PSTs’ experiences creating and publishing a book review podcast as an explicit part of their teacher preparation program draws on critical literacy traditions and critical inquiry-based pedagogies. The research design included collection of book review podcasts, written reflections from PSTs after completing the podcasts, written peer feedback, and ethnographic field notes. The author uses qualitative methods including critical incident and descriptive review analyses to gain insight into how PSTs engaged an invitation to write, record, and publish a book review podcast. The work is grounded in a conceptual framework around socio-cultural constructions of literacy, new media ecologies, and arts-based literacies.

Findings – In order to create an engaging book review podcast, PSTs must be supported to think about the value and purpose of the sonic as part of the whole composition and provided challenging, sustained opportunities to experiment with different sonic elements as part of their composing processes. Although used in different ways, sound was a critical variable in podcast production. Sound played a vital role in engaging listeners by drawing on and manipulating elements such as pausing, voice inflection, intonation, and music that are not characteristic of the typical book reviews. Despite PSTs’ engagement with and interest in learning how to use and compose with these additional elements, many found this activity to be time consuming and difficult; having no previous exposure to this technology. The nature of this assignment and the novelty of the podcasting platform also shifted some of the typical discourse patterns in online discussion boards from that of academic dialogue, to a heightened sense of encouragement and commendation.

Practical Implications – This inquiry contributes to the literature on teacher education, especially literacy education and English education, and has implications for understanding the unique opportunities and challenges of entering the teaching profession in this digital era. For teacher educators willing to commit to supporting and extending PSTs’ digital literacies, including podcasts in particular, a number of recommendations on designing a similar project are included, with a focus on inquiry-based, student-centered pedagogies.

The purpose of this study was to examine how teachers’ constructions of youth inform their text selections, particularly as they relate to a problematic author.

As part of a larger, national study, the authors use interview data from 18 participants – 9 who still teach and 9 who no longer teach Alexie – to consider how teachers’ constructions of youth play roles in their decisions to teach or avoid complex and controversial authors and topics, specifically the work and life of Sherman Alexie in the #MeToo era.

Findings suggest teachers who constructed youth through asset-based frameworks – as complex and capable – were likely to keep teaching Alexie or have conversations about the #MeToo movement. Teachers who constructed students in deficit ways, as “not ready,” harkened back to Lesko’s (2012) critique, and were more likely to either remove Alexie from the curriculum entirely or engage students in conversations about the text only, leaving Alexie’s life out of the classroom.

Building on Lesko’s work on constructions of adolescence and its intersection with Petrone et al.’s youth lens and Critical Youth Studies (e.g., Petrone and Lewis, 2021), this study describes the ways in which teachers’ views of students served as rationales for their teaching decisions around whether, if or how to include the works and life of Sherman Alexie.

The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates’ response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character’s body. This paper explores how readers’ meaning making was influenced when reading prose versus comics. This paper adds to a corpus of scholarship about the relationships between young adult literature, comics, bodies and reader response theory.

At the time of the study, participants were enrolled in a teacher education program at a Midwestern University, meeting monthly for a voluntary book club dedicated to reading and discussing young adult literature. To examine readers’ responses to comics and prose featuring fat-identified protagonists, the author used descriptive qualitative methodologies to conduct a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, written participant reflections and researcher memos. Analysis was grounded in theories of reader response, critical fat studies and multimodality.

Analyses indicated many readers reject textual clues indicating a character’s body size and weight were different from their own. Readers read their bodies into the stories, regarding them as self-help narratives instead of radical counternarratives. Some readers were not able to read against their assumptions of thinness (and whiteness) until prompted by the researcher and other participants.

Although many reader response scholars have demonstrated readers’ tendencies toward personal identification in the face of racial and class differences, there is less research regarding classroom practices around the entanglement of physical bodies, body image and texts. Analyzing reader’s responses to the constructions of fat bodies in prose versus comics may help English Language Arts (ELA) educators and students identify and deconstruct ideologies of thin-thinking and fatphobia. This study, which demonstrates thin readers’ tendencies to overidentify with protagonists, suggests ELA classrooms might encourage readers to engage in critical literacies that support them in reading both with and against their identities.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the role of mineralisers on the formation of perovskite structure, optimise the amounts of chromium content, soaking time and finally the ratio of fuel (citric acid) to oxidiser (metal nitrate) and investigation of the physical properties of resulted pigments.

A red pigment based on perovskite structure (YAl_1-yCr_yO₃, y = (0.01-0.1) was synthesised by solution combustion method with various mineralisers, like NaF, MgF₂ and Li₂CO₃. Thermal decomposition of the resulting nitrate-citrate gels and the phase evolution of calcined powders were investigated and the microstructure and colorimetry of the emerging products were characterised.

The most effective mineraliser system for the formation of YAlO₃ perovskite was NaF:MgF₂:Li₂CO₃ (3:2:1 by weight). Furthermore, desirable pigments were obtained by firing the samples at 1,400°C for 4 hours. The highest redness parameter (a*) and reflectance value were obtained when y was 0.03 and 0.01, respectively. Increasing the fuel: oxidiser ratio led to an increase in the a* parameter. Use of the optimum prepared red pigment in the low and high firing temperature glazes gave a high chemical and thermal stability.

Only citric acid was used as fuel. Other fuels and different ratios of fuel to oxidiser could also be studied.

The method developed provided a new approach for preparation to nontoxic, high-temperature, ceramic red pigment compared to the solid-state method.

The methods for synthesis of pigment based on perovskite structure with different chromium contents and for evaluation of thermal stability of pigment in glaze were novel.

A switching regression model is employed to test for the presence of financial constraints in the determination of oil exporters′ imports from industrial countries. The main assumption of the model is the exogenous determination of this bloc′s terms of trade. The analysis uses both discrete and smooth‐switching techniques for estimating disequilibrium models. The results on the whole indicate the importance of financial constraints in trade. Further support for the framework is provided by the fact that separate estimations for the high and low absorbers appear to suggest that revenue from trade has been of greater importance for the former category.

This chapter examines the ways in which literacy is used in the daily life in one rural village community in Simbu in the Papua New Guinea highlands.¹ An ethnographic perspective enables us to see how literacy is incorporated into already existing concepts and conventions regarding aspects of village cultural and social life. The material presented here relates to how the uses of reading and writing are strongly associated with local notions of self-promotion, economic relations and decoration. At the same time, I will show that the panoply of literacy uses in these contexts are overlaid and to a large extent governed by literacy’s associations with modernity. The chapter first provides a general overview of the kinds of reading practices that occur in the village setting, noting that many of these practices do not correspond to the ways in which agencies responsible for imparting literacy, particularly the local school, intend. The ensuing sections demonstrate how uses of writing in the village are shaped by local concepts of prestige, chance and reciprocity. These are not intended to be seen as discrete and mutually exclusive but rather as general, albeit overlapping, social phenomena which help illuminate the processes by which literacy has been added to the communicative repertoire.

Following recent scholarship promoting the study of sports-related texts as a vehicle for examining sociopolitical issues, this study aims to identify methods and materials used to facilitate the extended exploration of sociopolitical issues in a secondary sports literature class and to establish how students describe their experiences taking up such activities.

This qualitative study stems from a greater investigation into the teaching of secondary sports literature classes. Data collection involved conducting interviews, observing instruction and gathering artifacts. Driven by guiding research questions, data analysis was conducted in an iterative and recursive manner and multiple validation strategies were used to enhance trustworthiness.

The methods and materials used to facilitate the extended exploration of sociopolitical issues included a whole-class reading of Season of Life (Marx, 2003) and small-group research into “controversial topics” in sports culture. Student-participants described engaging with those methods and materials as relevant to their personal interests and experiences and revelatory in terms of learning about sociopolitical issues in sports and society.

Scholarship promoting the potential for sports-related content to support literacy instruction has grown in recent years. This study covers new ground, for it documents classroom research to build understandings about the methods and materials used to facilitate the extended exploration of sociopolitical issues in a secondary sports literature class and the ways students describe their experiences engaging in such activities.