Challenging Traditional Classroom Spaces with Young Adult Literature

As a high school teacher, Ricki Ginsberg realized that a truly student-centered classroom requires student input. To foster a more ethical, community-based approach to curriculum design and instruction, she worked with her students to reimagine and co-design existing, grade-level courses, and in doing so, they integrated young adult literature as central to the curriculum and course design. In this book, Ginsberg, along with more than a dozen teacher contributors, shares course design possibilities for teachers seeking to disrupt and reimagine traditional structures with the inclusion of YA literature.

With communities of practice as a guiding framework, Challenging Traditional Classroom Spaces with YA Literature explores how teachers might work with students to build a community that defines their purposes together, how they might investigate new possibilities for existing or traditional courses by harnessing the potential of YA literature, how they might use critical freedom to co-develop YA electives, and how they can lead literate lives together as a community of practice that is engaged with their local and global communities.

Grounded in NCTE’s Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature position statement, this book offers both big ideas, such as overarching structural decisions and pedagogical positioning, as well as a wealth of flexible and adaptable practical strategies and ideas that can be implemented directly in secondary classrooms with varied contexts and purposes.