Acts of Resistance: Subversive Teaching in the English Language Arts Classroom

A 2021 SPE Outstanding Book Award Winner

In 1969, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner published Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Subversive teaching today, however, looks very different than it did in 1969. Teachers today must deliver their instruction in an era of formidable challenges related to curriculum, educational policy, and cultural and political ideology. Students learn in an environment that includes active shooter drills and increasingly violent public policy that assaults immigrants, people of Color, women, and the LGBTQIA+ community. A robust public education is needed now more than ever, though the resources to provide it dwindle daily.

Acts of Resistance: Subversive Teaching in the English Language Arts (ELA) Classroom showcases examples of subversive pedagogy to instruct and inspire teachers and to contextualize subversive ELA pedagogy in the contemporary educational moment. Chapter authors--in-service teachers and teacher educators alike--draw from case studies, narrative inquiry, and other qualitative methodologies to explain how they have variously taken up subversive pedagogy in the ELA classroom. Because teachers and other stakeholders resist oppressive structures―including disciplinary confinements―when they teach from subversive viewpoints, each chapter describes a disciplinary “act of resistance” that illuminates possibilities for countering uncritical, “traditional” handling of ELA experiences.

Perfect for courses such as:
ELA Methods | Literacy Methods | Social Justice | Critical Literacy | Writing | Literature | Disciplinary Literacy | Curriculum Theory |  Pedagogy | ELA Professional Development (Inservice Teachers)

Dr. Jeanne Dyches (she/her), an associate professor at Iowa State University, researches the relationship between curriculum, racial literacies, and antiracist teaching practices. Specifically, she works to understand how teachers and students resist limitations of their curriculum in order to engage antiracist, emancipatory, and joyful secondary literacy instruction. A former high school English teacher and literacy coach, Dr. Dyches has won awards for her teaching on both the secondary and post-secondary levels. The American Educational Research Association, American Reading Forum, Society of Professors of Education, and Iowa Academy of Education have recognized Dr. Dyches’ research and scholarly contributions to the field of education. Dr. Dyches has published in many journals, including Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Teacher Education, English Journal, and Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.

Brandon Sams is an assistant professor of English education at Iowa State University. His work has recently been published in English Teaching: Practice and Critique, The ALAN Review, Changing English, and The Journal of Language and Literacy Education.

Ashley S. Boyd (she/her) is an associate professor of English/English Education at Washington State University, where she teaches graduate courses on critical theories and anti-oppressive pedagogies and undergraduate courses on Young Adult Literature and Methods for Teaching English. A former secondary English-language arts teacher, Ashley’s scholarship examines practicing teachers’ social justice pedagogies and their critical content knowledge; explores how young adult literature is an avenue for cultivating students’ critical literacies; and investigates how students select, organize, and implement social action projects. Her books, including Social Justice Literacies in the English Classroom: Teaching Practice in Action, analyze and amplify how teachers subvert traditional classroom curriculum to advance equity and justice. She is co-author of Reading for Action: Engaging Youth in Social Justice through Young Adult Literature, and she has also published in the Journal of Teacher Education, English Education, and The ALAN Review.