Critical Encounters in Secondary English

Grounded in solid theory with new field-tested classroom activities, the fourth edition of Critical Encounters in Secondary English continues to help teachers integrate the lenses of contemporary literary theory into practices that have always defined good pedagogy.

The most significant change for this edition is the addition of a full chapter on critical race theory (CRT) as an analytical lens. CRT offers teachers fresh opportunities for interdisciplinary planning and teaching, as it lends itself to lessons that encompass a variety of disciplines such as history, sociology, psychology, and science. As with the previous edition, each chapter concludes with a list of suggested nonfiction pieces that work well for the particular lens under discussion.

This popular text provides a comprehensive approach to incorporating nonfiction and informational texts into the literature classroom with new and revised classroom activities appropriate for today’s students.

Book Features:

• Helps both pre- and inservice ELA teachers introduce contemporary literary theory into their classrooms.
• Offers lucid and accessible explications of contemporary literary theory.
• Provides dozens of innovative and field-tested classroom activities.
• Tackles the thorny issue of Critical Race Theory in helpful and practical ways.

Deborah Appleman is the Hollis L. Caswell Professor of Educational Studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

“Deborah Appleman has done more than any other educational leader in America to rescue and revitalize the teaching of literature. This new edition of her classic book makes it even more relevant to the lives and concerns of today's students, and more helpful to classroom teachers of literature everywhere.”
—Sheridan Blau, former president, NCTE and professor emeritus, The University of California, Santa Barbara

“If you believe that literature can be powerful and transformative, this book will supercharge your teaching. Deborah Appleman provides readers with tools and questions to support reading in ways that promote its transformational possibilities, develop social imagination, and support readers to reach their own illuminating conclusions. This edition includes a courageous new chapter on critical race theory, which takes the proverbial bull by the horns. This book does the work of personal and social transformation and more: It does the work of democracy.”
—Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Distinguished Professor of English Education, Boise State University

Praise for the Third Edition

“What a smart and useful book! It provides teachers with a wealth of knowledge and material to help their students develop critical perspective and suppleness of thought.”
—Mike Rose, University of California, Los Angeles

“This third edition proves that Appleman still has her hand on the pulse of the rapidly changing landscape of education.”
—Ernest Morrell, Teachers College, Columbia University

“This new edition of Deborah Appleman’s now classic book demonstrates even more dramatically than previously how the critical theories she so skillfully teaches serve not only as lenses for the reading of literature, but as tools for discovering, interrogating, and challenging injustice, hypocrisy, and the hidden power relations that students are likely to encounter.”
—Sheridan Blau, Teachers College, Columbia University

Contents (FINAL)

Preface to the Fourth Edition  ix

Introduction  1

1.  What We Teach and Why: Contemporary Literary Theory and Adolescents  3

2.  Prisms of Possibilities: Introducing Multiple Perspectives  18

3.  The Lens of Reader Response: The Promise and Peril of Response-Based Pedagogy  30

4.  What’s Class Got to Do With It? Reading Literature Through the Lens of Privilege and Social Class  52

5.  The Social Construction of Gender: A Lens of One’s Own  67

6.  Columbus Did What? Postcolonialism in the Literature Classroom  86

7.  Critical Race Theory: Much Ado About Something  98

8.  Deconstruction: Postmodern Theory and the Postmodern High School Student  113

9.  Lenses and Learning Styles: Accommodating Student Plurality With Theoretical Plurality  129

10.  Critical Encounters: Reading the World  142

Appendix: Classroom Activities  150

Selected Literary Texts  257

References  260

Index  266

About the Author  274

Download classroom activities in PDF format