Cart’s up-to-date coverage makes this the perfect resource for YA librarians who want to sharpen their readers’ advisory skills, educators and teachers who work with young people, and anyone else who wants to understand where YA lit has been and where it’s heading.

Thanks to the success of franchises such as The Hunger Games and Twilight, young adult literature has reached a new level of prominence and popularity. Teens and adults alike are drawn to the genre's coming-of-age themes, fast pacing, and vivid emotional portrayals. The essays in this volume suggest ways high school and college instructors can incorporate YA texts into courses in literature, education, library science, and general education. The first group of essays explores key issues in YA literature, situates works in cultural contexts, and addresses questions of text selection and censorship. The second section discusses a range of genres within YA literature, including both realistic and speculative fiction as well as verse narratives, comics, and film. The final section offers ideas for assignments, including interdisciplinary and digital projects, in a variety of courses.

Teaching Young Adult Literature: Developing Students As World Citizens (by Thomas W. Bean, Judith Dunkerly-Bean, and Helen Harper) is a middle and secondary school methods text that introduces pre-service teachers in teacher credential programs and in-service teachers pursuing a Masters degree in Education to the field of young adult literature for use in contemporary contexts. The text introduces teachers to current research on adolescent life and literacy; the new and expanding genres of young adult literature; teaching approaches and practical strategies for using young adult literature in English and Language Arts secondary classrooms and in Content Area Subjects (e.g. History); and ongoing social, political and pedagogical issues of English and Language Arts classrooms in relation to contemporary young adult literature.

The authors who contributed to this text believe that young adult literature (YAL) can meet the Common Core’s push to include literacy across content areas, as well as meet the standards in creative and effective ways. This text is intended to give educators a resource to aid them in creating a literacy curriculum. The included chapters written by experts from different universities across the country offer a variety of methods for using YAL to meet the standards while connecting with students. Following a framework first chapter introducing the importance of YAL and discussing its relevance, other authors tackle various ways to teach it. Each chapter may suggest different strategies and rationales for utilizing YAL, but each shares a common purpose with the others: to promote the efficacy of YAL to engage students while at the same time meeting the rigorous standards set forth by the Common Core.

This examination of the literary effectiveness of young adult literature from a critical, research-oriented perspective answers two key questions asked by many teachers and scholars in the field: Does young adult literature stand up on its own as literature? Is it worthy of close study? The treatment is both conceptual and pragmatic. Each chapter discusses a topical text set of YA novels in a conceptual framework—how these novels contribute to or deconstruct conventional wisdom about key topics from identity formation to awareness of world issues, while also providing a springboard in secondary and college classrooms for critical discussion of these novels. Uncloaking many of the issues that have been essentially invisible in discussions of YA literature, these essays can then guide the design of curriculum through which adolescent readers hone the necessary skills to unpack the ideologies embedded in YA narratives. The annotated bibliography provides supplementary articles and books germane to all the issues discussed. Closing "End Points" highlight and reinforce cross-cutting themes throughout the book and tie the essays together.

This book advocates for a stronger role for young-adult literature in ELA classrooms, compellingly documenting how this body of work meets both the needs of adolescent students and the demands of the common core for complex texts and tasks. Integrating Young Adult Literature through the Common Core Standards provides a compelling template for teachers that uses young adult literature and inquiry learning to meet students' needs and the demands of the common core standards. The first part of the book addresses the widely adopted common core state standards by examining closely the standards' model of text complexity and demonstrating how young adult literature can fill the requirements of this model. The second part provides theoretical discussions and analysis of the standards as well as concrete applications of young adult literature within the classroom in order to give school professionals a comprehensive understanding of how young adult literature and the standards can work together. The book empowers schools and teachers to make intelligent, informed decisions about texts and instructional practices that benefit their students. Finally, the authors explore a powerful teaching approach that integrates current understandings about learning, young adult literature, and the common core standards in a way that will facilitate greater learning and understanding in English classrooms.

Young Adult literature, from The Outsiders to Harry Potter, has helped shape the cultural landscape for adolescents perhaps more than any other form of consumable media in the twentieth and twenty-first century. With the rise of mega blockbuster films based on these books in recent years, the young adult genre is being co-opted by curious adult readers and by Hollywood producers. However, while the genre may be getting more readers than ever before, Young Adult literature remains exclusionary and problematic: few titles feature historically marginalized individuals, the books present heteronormative perspectives, and gender stereotypes continue to persist. Taking a critical approach, Young Adult Literature: Challenging Genres offers educators, youth librarians, and students a set of strategies for unpacking, challenging, and transforming the assumptions of some of the genre's most popular titles. Pushing the genre forward, Antero Garcia builds on his experiences as a former high school teacher to offer strategies for integrating Young Adult literature in a contemporary critical pedagogy through the use of participatory media.

Taking a critical, research-oriented perspective, this exploration of the theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical connections between the reading and teaching of young adult literature and adolescent identity development centers around three key questions: Who are the teens reading young adult literature? Why should teachers teach young adult literature? Why are teens reading young adult literature? All chapters work simultaneously on two levels: each provides both a critical resource about contemporary young adult literature that could be used in YA literature classes or workshops and specific practical suggestions about what texts to use and how to teach them effectively in middle and high school classes. Theorizing, problematizing, and reflecting in new ways on the teaching and reading of young adult literature in middle and secondary school classrooms, this valuable resource for teachers and teacher educators will help them to develop classrooms where students use literature as a means of making sense of themselves, each other, and the world around them.

This volume offers a novel approach to exploring how literary response groups can be used as part of teacher education programs to help preservice teachers navigate "wobble" moments. Focusing uniquely on the potential of young adult literature (YAL), the text draws on the first-hand experiences of teacher candidates and uses a range of well-known books to demonstrate how narrative-based inquiry and analysis of fictional depictions of teaching and learning can support reflection on a range of common challenges. The volume presents how YAL literary response groups are shown to enhance participants’ ability to reflect on practice, build resilience, and develop deeper understanding of pedagogical principles by offering a shared dialogical space. These insights ultimately contribute to teacher education program improvement by enhancing teacher candidates’ understanding of pedagogy. This text will benefit researchers, doctoral students, and academics in the fields of teaching, teacher mentoring, and teacher education more specifically. Those interested in literature studies and young adult literature (YAL) more broadly will also benefit from this volume.

Selected as the Children’s Literature Association’s 2023 Honor Book Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ+ characters is booming. In the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred annual releases. Queer characters are also appearing more frequently in film, on television, and in video games. This explosion of queer representation, however, has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. What makes for a good “coming out” story? Will increased queer representation in young people’s media teach adolescents the right lessons and help queer teens live better, happier lives? What if these stories harm young people instead of helping them? In Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, Derritt Mason considers these questions through a range of popular media, including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro, the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Mason argues themes that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture—queer visibility, risk taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, and the promise that “It Gets Better” and the threat that it might not—challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people’s media. Instead of imagining queer young adult literature as a subgenre defined by its visibly queer characters, Mason proposes that we see “queer YA” as a body of transmedia texts with blurry boundaries, one that coheres around affect—specifically, anxiety—instead of content.