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Teachers want their students to have access to the books they need to fall in love with reading, which means having classroom and school libraries stocked with a wide variety of books. But as English teachers are well aware, Texas leads the nation in book challenges and bans. This article defines and describes the different forms of censorship and includes extensive information and resources to support classroom teachers as they prepare for and respond to book challenges, including building allies and staying in tune with organizations that provide support. The authors conclude by describing how book challenges are the current reality and that we must work toward and remain hopeful for a future in which diverse classroom libraries abound.

Seems to me there are lots of ways to be brave. --KATHERINE APPLEGATE, AN AUTHOR WHOSE BOOK WISHTREE WAS RECENTLY CHALLENGED IN FLORIDA These days, materials used in American classrooms [...]

This article discusses the current contradictory policies surrounding the push for phonics instruction in Texas schools. Focusing on this current iteration of the reading wars, this article seeks to help teachers develop a historical context for reading instruction, review existing research on learning to read, and turn that knowledge into practical strategies for advocating for a comprehensive approach to literacy.

In September 2023, the American Library Association released its interim report on book challenges and bans for this year ('Book Ban Data'). The report shows that the rate of book [...]

In the article "No Need to Reinvent the Wheel: Reading Instruction in a Time of Change" published in "English in Texas" in 2017, the authors, Ann D. David and Katrina Jansky, viewed reading instruction through five touchstones: time, choice, relevance, talk, and routines and rituals. This article expands on those touchstones by examining writing instruction, offering classroom practices that can support a diverse range of student writers and bring back joy and pleasure to the writing classroom.

It is no longer if you will experience a book challenge, but when. That reality is the genesis for this column that seeks to share teachers' stories of teaching texts [...]

In Texas, it's an era of uncertainty: new TEKS, changes to STAAR, school finance. What's a teacher to do? How can teachers avoid reinventing the reading curriculum every time a change rolls around? Reflecting on the foundations of reading instruction--time, choice, relevance, talk, and rituals and routines--offers a way to answer these challenging questions. This article connects each of these touchstones to theory and research as well as discusses brief strategies that support each principle. The article also offers teacher commentary on each principle. Finally, the authors argue that the heart of reading instruction doesn't change: it is readers falling in love with books.

The author reflects on the development of her own reading life and how that rich reading life failed to influence how she taught reading early in her career. During graduate studies, while researching in classrooms where reading workshop was the instructional model and through talking to those exemplary teachers, the author came to understand both the how and why of teaching readers, not books. Drawing on experience and research literature, the author offers ways to develop students' reading lives within the context of English language arts classrooms.

"Research says…" a lot. But how does research come to say anything? One way is by having teachers open their classroom doors to a researcher. In this article, we share the stories of two teachers who opened their doors to the authors' research and were glad they did. The teachers contrast this experience to other research experiences in which they felt coerced to participate and whose objectives were unclear. When teachers understand their rights, their students' rights, and the kind of data researchers intend to collect, they will be far more comfortable with the process and far more willing to invite researchers into their classrooms.

Using two case studies, we highlight preservice teachers' (PSTs) perspectival understanding to consider what experiences, or combinations of experiences, children's literature supports PSTs' journeys in building empathy in their teaching. The notion of perspectival understanding guided our examination as we unpacked PSTs' responses to opportunities to engage with multiple perspectives that existed in diverse children's literature. Two individual literacy courses served as the foundation for this analysis. The findings of the first case suggest that PSTs shifted their views on the roles of children's literature, gaining an understanding of how multicultural literature could more equitably represent and support diverse students' learning. In the second case, PSTs' participation in book club discussions of chapter books depicting immigrant children's experiences revealed that they were able to engage in perspective-taking to some extent by focusing on protagonists without considering other supporting characters. Productive future inquiries could include assignment-level, course-level, and semester-level study of teacher education programmatic redesign to center empathy, leading to the development of perspectival understanding, toward children from historically marginalized communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a design experiment in which 4th grade bilingual students were invited to engage in new literacy practices of linking, multimodality, and design using only ordinary, concrete materials like ink, paper, tape, and boxes. The inquiry was undertaken in the midst of a unit of study on memoir in a writing workshop, under conditions of a high-stakes writing test, in a low-income school, in a classroom of Latino students who spoke Spanish as their first language. The students engaged with these literacy practices common in digital environments, without digital devices, in varied ways, including: the use of objects, words, and partial texts as links capable of changing one's mind; the use of images as tools for thinking and for revising toward readers; and design as a means of focusing thinking and also making unconventional textual objects. (Contains 8 figures.)

The article discusses how preservice teachers engage in practices grounded in process discourse in the context of their teacher education courses and how preservice teachers' beliefs about their writing self-efficacy change during a semester of engaging in writing. It is noted that teachers develop a practical concept as they make decisions within these tensions and competing ideas, which is inherent in good teaching.