Inquiry-Based English Instruction

This valuable resource offers an alternative framework for middle and secondary school English instruction. The authors provide concrete strategies for engaging students in critical inquiry projects about the social worlds they inhabit or about those portrayed in literature and the media—their peer, school, family, romance, community, workplace, and virtual worlds. You will find numerous examples of middle and high school students using various literacy tools (language, genres, narratives, signs, multimedia, and drama) to study, represent, critique, and transform these worlds. Rather than simply studying about literacy practices, this new framework shows how students learn best through active participation driven by a need to critically examine and promote changes in their social worlds.

Richard Beach is Wallace Professor of English Education at the University of Minnesota. Jamie Myers is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy Education at Pennsylvania State University.

“A landmark volume. It takes the best of what we know and pushes us at least two steps further. It simultaneously represents best practice, our current knowledge base, and new possible futures.”
—from the Foreword by Jerome C. Harste

“Richard Beach and Jamie Myers have created a gift to the profession: a rare example at the secondary level of integrated, socially conscious, inquiry-based education, an education that students take up in class and take into their lives.”
Carole Edelsky, Arizona State University.

"An important book for teachers and teacher educators because it gives readers the tools to engage in an inquiry-based approach in their literacy classrooms." —Margaret Finders, Purdue University