Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Reading for Action: Engaging Youth in Social Justice through Young Adult Literature

This book illustrates how teachers can draw upon young adult literature to facilitate students' social action. Each chapter centers on one novel that represents a contemporary topic including police brutality, women's rights, ecojustice, and bullying. In each, authors provide pre-, during-, and after reading strategies for teaching that connect the social issues in the texts to students' lives and to the world around them. They then offer a multitude of avenues for student action, emphasizing the need to move readers from understanding and awareness to asserting their own agency and capacities to effect change in their local, national, and global communities. In addition to methods for scaffolding students' analysis of texts and topics, authors also offer a plethora of additional resources such as documentaries, canonical companions for study, connected music, and supplementary lesson plans. Review This book is an essential resource for educators who want to introduce students to an array of social justice issues with texts that their students will actually want to read. Containing strategies for teaching contemporary issues with some of the latest and most popular young adult titles, this text also shares strategies for infusing canonical works, music, and other young adult texts into instruction. In each chapter the authors also provide websites, online videos, articles, and other electronic resources related to the text and topic discussed. User friendly yet rigorous, Reading for Action is a must for experienced and new teachers alike who are invested in their students, social justice, and culturally responsive instruction.--Victor Malo-Juvera, associate professor, Department of English, University of North Carolina, Wilmington Boyd (Washington State Univ.) and Darragh (Univ. of Idaho), experts in the field of young adult literature, have created a text enabling readers to uncover social justice themes in young adult literature, a rare accomplishment for the discipline. Each of the book's 12 chapters is devoted to a different social justice issue, including bullying, poverty, mental health, police brutality, sexual orientations and stigmas, and ecojustice, relating the given topic to a specific novel that treats the same issue. Each chapter also incorporates suggested teaching strategies, ideas for social action, supplemental resources, and substantial references. This reader-friendly volume supports the notion that what is taught in the classroom should be applied outside school as well and encourages action, by teachers and others, to tear down barriers to inclusiveness in the classroom. Reading for Action offers teaching techniques designed to resist and disrupt the status quo while remaining within the accepted boundaries of contemporary classrooms, making it a valuable resource for both current teachers and those preparing to become teachers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate students.--CHOICE Boyd and Darragh move the conversation on YA Literature from it potential to meet standards to its ability to help teachers and students address complex issues through social action. They address contemporary issues that engage adolescent concerns by highlighting a diverse YA text. Each chapter illustrates reading strategies for each text and provides ideas for engaging students in social action. They connect each text to parallel canonical selections, other YA offerings, and, my favorite, music.--Steven T. Bickmore, Associate Professor of English Education, University of Nevada Las Vegas; curator, Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday Blog Providing the impetus for embedding social justice in ELA classrooms via young adult literature for teachers forms the focus of this cutting-edge text. The authors offer an additional caveat--guiding teachers toward developing the skills and abilities to create agency in their own students. Those who aspire to a socially just stance i