Encouraging Activism in Secondary English

<i>Encouraging Activism in Secondary English: Reading and Writing for Social Justice </i>outlines a framework to encourage social justice teaching in the secondary English classroom by providing teachers with valuable materials for designing a curriculum that fosters social justice and strategies that can be taught to encourage reading and writing that empower students to take action on social issues that matter to them. Each chapter focuses on a potential anchor text, along with possible pairings, and offers specific suggestions for ways to teach and create potential activities and assignments that foster social justice. Anchor texts include works such as <i>The Outsiders</i> by S. E. Hinton, <i>Night </i>by Elie Wiesel,<i> Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i> by Mark Twain, and <i>1984 </i>by George Orwell. The chapters include information about historical and contemporary social movements such as the Occupy Movement, protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Greta Thunberg’s climate crisis movement. Each chapter then offers specific suggestions for helping students to engage in critical inquiry, discussions, and reflection on their own experiences while reading.