TCH 238
ELA Literature Methods for Middle School
Professor, School of Teaching & Learning
Illinois State University
About Our Class
This course draws upon research/evidence-based instructional models that are grounded in constructivist, student-centered approaches and activities. You will examine ways to structure literacy rich environments that promote literacy development. We focus on effective instructional approaches that help early adolescents learn from a variety of texts. You will also learn how to effectively plan and modify instruction to meet the needs of all students.
Our Texts
Letting Go of Literary Whiteness
"Rooted in examples from their own and others’ classrooms, the authors offer discipline-specific practices for implementing antiracist literature instruction in White-dominant schools. Each chapter explores a key dimension of antiracist literature teaching and learning, including designing literature-based units that emphasize racial literacy, selecting literature that highlights voices of color, analyzing Whiteness in canonical literature, examining texts through a critical race lens, managing challenges of race talk, and designing formative assessments for racial literacy and identity growth."
Find Layla
"Underprivileged and keenly self-aware, SoCal fourteen-year-old Layla Bailey isn’t used to being noticed. Except by mean girls who tweet about her ragged appearance. All she wants to do is indulge in her love of science, protect her vulnerable younger brother, and steer clear of her unstable mother.
Then a school competition calls for a biome. Layla chooses her own home, a hostile ecosystem of indoor fungi and secret shame. With a borrowed video camera, she captures it all. The mushrooms growing in her brother’s dresser. The black mold blooming up the apartment walls. The unmentionable things living in the dead fridge. All the inevitable exotic toxins that are Layla’s life. Then the video goes viral.
When Child Protective Services comes to call, Layla loses her family and her home. Defiant, she must face her bullies and friends alike, on her own. Unafraid at last of being seen, Layla accepts the mortifying reality of visibility. Now she has to figure out how to stay whole and stand behind the truth she has shown the world."
Ain't Burned All the Bright
"Author Reynolds and artist Griffin, friends and previous collaborators (My Name Is Jason. Mine Too.), explore recent events in America through a poetic multimedia partnership told in three “breaths.” […] As Reynolds’s lines depict Black people facing police brutality, Covid-19, and general concerns regarding safety, Griffin’s captivating collages literally and metaphorically capture a constant state of worry and panic, leading to visual moments that encourage the reader to find solace and inspiration in the everyday." ~ Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW ― 11/15/2021
Novel Choices
We will be choosing from the following books for our literature circles unit. You will only be required to have one of the titles.
Paradise on Fire by Jewell Parker Rhodes
Fast Pitch by Nic Stone
Each Tiny Spark by Pablo Cartaya
One of the Good Ones by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite
A Snake Falls to the Earth by Darcie Little Badger
On the Hook by Francisco X Stork
Indivisible by Daniel Aleman
Things We Couldn’t Say by Jay Cole
Walking in Two Worlds by Wab Kinew
Amira & Hamza: The War to Save the Worlds by Samira Ahmed
From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement by Paula Yoo
The Reading Zone
"[Atwell] show[s] how to teach reading as a personal art―a way to develop passionate, critical readers for life―and how to build a schoolwide reading culture on self-selected, voluminous reading. The authors describe the top ten conditions for making engaged classroom reading possible for students at all levels and share the ideas and structures that have helped their own students succeed."