Teaching Literature in the Context of Literacy Instruction

"For English teachers, literature is a beloved natural. This passion is our strength; it can also be our Achilles' heel, if we do not understand how to channel our passion to serve 21^st century students."

Jocelyn Chadwick and John Grassie explore how the familiar literature we love can be taught in a way that not only engages students, but does so within the context of literacy instruction which reflects the needs of today's students. They address complex questions secondary English teachers wrangle with daily: where does literature live within the Common Core's mandates? How can we embrace informational texts in our literature classrooms? And most importantly, how can we help students recognize how canonical works are relevant to them? Their solution is to create an integrated, side-by-side blend of canonical texts with works of contemporary authors and multimedia resources which help build a bridge to literacy, and provide the "here-and-now" students crave today. With examples of old and new texts and resources being used together to address a myriad of themes and challenging questions, the authors illustrate how to help students make connections between the literature and their own lives. A toolbox of the authors' most often-used rubrics, templates and teacher resources is included.

Jocelyn A. Chadwick has been an English teacher for over thirty years--beginning at Irving High School in Texas and later moving on to the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she was a professor for nine years and still guest lectures. Dr. Chadwick also serves as a consultant for school districts around the country and assists English departments with curricula to reflect diversity and cross-curricular content. For the past two years, she has served as a consultant for NBC News Education's Common Core Project for Parents, ParentToolkit. In June 2015, Chadwick was elected Vice President for the National Council of Teachers of English.

Throughout her career, she has published articles in leading academic journals, presented papers at scholarly conferences, and conducted teacher workshops around the country and abroad. Her many publications include The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, "Making Characters Come Alive! Using Characters for Identification and Engagement," "Assessment: Our (Re) Inventing the Future of English," and her April 2015 book, Common Core: Paradigmatic Shift. Summing up her career, Dr. Chadwick says she was born to be an English teacher and will always be one.

John Grassie is a veteran broadcast journalist, with more than 25 years' experience producing news coverage, program series, and documentaries for Public Television, NBC News, and Discovery. During his broadcast career, Grassie's work received numerous awards for excellence in journalism. In making the transition to focusing on education, Grassie says he knew his next goal was moving from the TV control room to the classroom. That transition has taken him through lecturing at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Boston University on the impact and influence of informational programming on public policy. He has also written and lectured on the role of mass media in developing the emerging concept of digital literacy and its role in the classroom.