Celebrating Young Adult Literature
from NCTE INOBX 11-29-11
While some of us packed up and went home after the NCTE Annual Convention, more than 500 people stayed for the 2011 ALAN Workshop which celebrates the very best of young adult literature. Many workshop attendees have been publishing blog posts and tweeting about their time there.
What is ALAN? The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE (ALAN) promotes communication and cooperation among teachers, authors, librarians, publishers, teacher-educators and their students, and others who are particularly interested in the area of young adult literature. Members receive three issues annually of The ALAN Review, a journal emphasizing new books, research, and methods of teaching adolescent literature.
Are you interested in young adult literature? See what NCTE and ReadWriteThink.org have to offer!
Text Messages: Recommendations for Adolescent Readers is a monthly podcast providing families, educators, out-of-school practitioners, and tutors reading recommendations they can pass along to teen readers. Each episode features in-depth recommendations of titles that will engage and excite teen readers.
Teaching YA Lit through Differentiated Instruction (S) offers suggestions for incorporating YA lit into the high school curriculum. Each chapter opens with an introduction to and description of a different popular genre or award category of YA lit -- science fiction, realistic teen fiction, graphic novels, Pura Belpré award winners, nonfiction texts, poetry, historical YA fiction -- and then offers suggestions within that genre for whole-class instruction juxtaposed with a young adult novel more suited for independent reading or small-group activities. See more in a Web seminar recorded by the authors.
Engaging American Novels: Lessons from the Classroom (S) focuses on ten frequently taught American novels, both classic and contemporary, that can help promote engagement in reading. Texts highlighted include To Kill a Mockingbird, The Chocolate War, The Outsiders, and Out of the Dust. Teachers are challenged to think about how students best engage with texts, especially novels. Many of the tiles in the book have been challenged or censored. The NCTE Anti-Censorship Center offers advice, helpful documents, and other support to teachers faced with challenges to texts (e.g., literary works, films and videos, drama productions) or teaching methods used in their classrooms and schools.
In this article from English Journal, author Jennifer Buehler offers a wealth of Web resources and personal advice from popular YA authors to convince teachers and students to talk about the books they love. Read more in her companion lesson plan.
Cathy Fleischer, an English professor and mother of teenagers, helps parents and families navigate through the sometimes overwhelming messages they hear about adolescents and literacy in her book Reading and Writing and Teens: A Parent’s Guide to Adolescent Literacy (M-S). Looking for more ways to connected reading in and out of the classroom? Visit ReadWriteThink’s portal for Parent & Afterschool Resources.
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