Adventurous Thinking: Fostering Students' Rights to Read and Write in Secondary ELA Classrooms

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.

Mollie V. Blackburn is a professor in the Department of Teaching and. Learning at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on literacy, language, and social change, with particular attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and the teachers who serve them. Mollie is the author of  “Risky, Generous, Gender Work” (Research in the Teaching of English, February, 2006) and the winner of the 2005 Alan C. Purves Award.