Shelly Shaffer

Dr. Shelly Shaffer is Assistant Professor of Literacy in the Department of Education at Eastern Washington University. She co-edited the book Contending with Gun Violence in the English Language Classroom (Shaffer, Rumohr-Voskuil, & Bickmore, 2019), focused on teaching strategies for addressing (and talking about) gun violence. In addition, the following book chapters relate to teaching and analysis of YA literature: “’I wanted to write a truthful history’: Intersections of Critical Race Theory and Gender Schema in Mildred Taylor’s Work (1975-2020)” (Shaffer, Bedford, & Van Wig, in press); “Feral Youth: An Allegory for The Canterbury Tales” (Shaffer, 2021); “Date rape in Speak: Teaching for justice using the graphic novel” (Shaffer, 2020); “Adolescent counter-storytelling: Finding youth voice and truth in That’s Not What Happened” (Shaffer, 2019); “This is Where It Ends: How studying school shootings from multiple perspectives promotes critical literacy” (Shaffer, Ellsworth, Crawford, 2018); and “Race, racism, and power structures: Reading All American Boys in a social studies current events course” (Shaffer & Henning, 2017). Dr. Shaffer also published an article related to Young Adult literature in the social studies classroom: “Applying the world-changing through social action protocol with young adult literature” (Henning & Shaffer, 2019). Her current scholarly interests are teaching Young Adult Literature, research in the teaching of Young Adult literature, critical literacy, Young Adult literature in the content area, and reading motivation.