In 2006, a secondary English and feminist studies teacher created a course and designed a study around a reading exchange for eighth‐grade girls from two vastly different communities. Girls from a school in a northeastern state read young adult novels and wrote about their reading and related topics with girls from Washington, DC on a wikispace created for their collaborations. The participants wrote reading responses, posted videos, and deliberated over questions related to their reading and topics related to the challenges of growing up as girls. In addition, they co‐authored a girls' zine for a wider audience. In May, 2006, the girls met face‐to‐face to continue their work together. This study was designed to address the question: What happens when girls from different locations and backgrounds read and write together, and how might the internet facilitate this exchange? This article describes a part of that exchange.
In an attempt to counter the culture of high-stakes testing and the instrumental coverage of poetry, the authors designed and taught a sustained, intensive poetry course to secondary students. In this article they advocate a deep genre study of poetry for students and teachers and highlight important principles from their work that are applicable in a variety of teaching contexts.Poetry immersion: Reading, writing, and performing with secondary students In many English classrooms, teachers are required to devise a curriculum that is strongly connected to high-stakes assessments. An urge to 'cover' a variety of topics and genres and to teach to the standards and 'learning targets' established by organizations far from the classroom, colours teachers' work. In an effort to counter this fast-paced, skills-oriented trend of broad but shallow Corresponding author: tschillinger@poughkeepsieday.org 110 ª
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.