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.

Table of Contents:
Foreword Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Bullying Chapter 2: Global Poverty Chapter 3: Mental Health Chapter 4: Gender Chapter 5: Human Trafficking Chapter 6: Refugee Crisis Chapter 7: Women’s Rights Chapter 8: Social Class Disparities in the United States Chapter 9: Police Brutality Chapter 10: Immigration Reform Chapter 11: Social Acceptance of Diverse Sexual Orientations Chapter 12: Environmental Protection and Ecojustice Conclusion About the Authors Index

About the Author :
Ashley S. Boyd is an Assistant Professor of English Education at Washington State University where she teaches courses on English methods, young adult literature, and critical theories and pedagogies. A former secondary English teacher, Ashley’s research focuses on practicing teachers’ social justice pedagogies and their critical content knowledge and explores how young adult literature is an avenue for cultivating students’ critical literacies. Janine J. Darragh is an Associate Professor of Literacy and English as a Second Language at University of Idaho where she teaches courses on secondary literacy, young adult literature, and ESL. Her research focuses on sociocultural and social justice issues in teaching and learning.

Review :
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. With the proliferation of malignant narratives that purport to explain and justify social inequalities, teachers of young people need, more than ever, resources to counter them. Reading for Action provides, with great sensitivity, thought, and insight, precisely such a resource. Highly recommended. 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. 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 in learning will find the suggestions for developing active empathy both inspirational and practical. 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. Reading for Action provides students and teachers with suggestions on how to use young adult literature to address complex social issues. Each chapter focuses on a particular issue such as bullying, global poverty, or sexual orientation.