Teaching Young Adult Literature Today: Insights, Considerations, and Perspectives for the Classroom Teacher - Softcover

Hayn, Judith A.; Kaplan, Jeffrey S.; Clemmons, Karina R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1475829477 ISBN 13: 9781475829471

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016

Synopsis

Teaching Young Adult Literature Today introduces the reader to what is current and relevant in the plethora of good books available for adolescents. More importantly, literary experts illustrate how teachers everywhere can help their students become lifelong readers by simply introducing them to great reads—smart, insightful, and engaging books that are specifically written for adolescents. Hayn, Kaplan, and their contributors address a wide range of topics: how to avoid common obstacles to using YAL; selecting quality YAL for classrooms while balancing these with curriculum requirements; engaging disenfranchised readers; pairing YAL with technology as an innovative way to teach curriculum standards across all content areas. Contributors also discuss more theoretical subjects, such as the absence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) young adult literature in secondary classrooms; and contemporary YAL that responds to the changing expectations of digital generation readers who want to blur the boundaries between page and screen. This book has been updated to reflect the wealth of new YA literature that has been published since the first edition appeared in March 2012, and to reflect new trends in technology that influences how adolescents are reading and responding to literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Judith A. Hayn is associate professor of English education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is the chair of the NCTE Conference on English Education Commission on the Study and Teaching of Adolescent Literature and of SIGNAL, the Special Interest Group Network on Adolescent Literature for the International Reading Association. Hayn began her career in education as a middle and high school English language arts.
Jeffrey S. Kaplan is associate professor of English education at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Kaplan is President-Elect for ALAN, the Assembly for the Study of Literature for Adolescents. He is also the Research Connections Editor for the ALAN Review, a leading peer-reviewed journal on the study and teaching of young adult literature. Kaplan is a former middle and high school English Language Arts teacher.
Karina Clemmons, is an assistant professor of secondary education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has taught English for Speakers of Other Languages to middle school, high school and adult students in the United States and abroad.

Review:

Recent research on the effects of time spent pleasure reading in youth demonstrate that it explains cognitive progress over time, educational attainment and social mobility. This makes pleasure reading a civil rights issue. And what better to hook students on reading then the books that were written specifically for them? In this volume, the top researchers and thinkers about YA literature explore where YAL has been, where it is and where it’s going, with rich models for how to use YAL to engage our students with the power of reading and all the benefits that then accrue to them.

In this book, the top researchers and thinkers in the field of YAL show us how to engage readers with this literature, and how to do so in a project of social action that promotes ethical imagination and the productive struggle for greater understanding, raised consciousness and for civil rights. This book is a must-read for librarians, teachers and anyone at all who cares about adolescents, reading, and promoting social understanding and justice. (Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Distinguished Professor of English Education at Boise State University; Author of “Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want, and Why We Should Let Them”)

This is a very useful text for both classroom teachers and teacher educators. Teachers will enjoy its practical aspects; whereas, professors will find relevance in the research data. More research is definitely needed to prove the merits of using adolescent literature in today’s schools, and this textbook definitely will help the cause. (Joan F. Kaywell, professor of English education, University of South Florida; senior executive director, Florida Council of Teachers of English, 2010-2011; membership secretary, Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English; and author of Dear Author: Letters of Hope (NCSS Notable Book and 2007 VOYA Nonfiction Honor List))

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1475829477
• ISBN 13: 9781475829471
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 354