How Young Adult Literature Gets Taught

Book excerpt: A manual for teaching Young Adult Literature, this textbook presents perspectives and methods on how to organize and teach literature in engaging and inclusive ways that meet specific educational and programmatic goals. Each chapter is written by an expert and offers a rich and nuanced approach to teaching YA Literature through a distinct lens. The effective and creative ways to construct a course explored in this book include multimodal, historical, social justice, place-based approaches, and more. The broad spectrum of topics covered in the text gives pre-service teachers and students a toolbox to select and apply methods of their choosing that support effective reading and writing instruction in their own contexts, motivate students, and foster meaningful conversations in the classroom. Chapters feature consistent sections for theory and practice, course structure, suggestions for activities and assessments, and takeaways for further discussion to facilitate easy implementation in the classroom. This book is an essential text for pre-service teachers of English as well as professors and scholars of Young Adult Literature.