This book illuminates methods for drawing upon young adult literature to facilitate students' social action.

This book illustrates how teachers can draw upon young adult literature to facilitate students’ social action. Each chapter centers on one novel that represents a contemporary topic including police brutality, women’s rights, ecojustice, and bullying. In each, authors provide pre-, during-, and after reading strategies for teaching that connect the social issues in the texts to students’ lives and to the world around them. They then offer a multitude of avenues for student action, emphasizing the need to move readers from understanding and awareness to asserting their own agency and capacities to effect change in their local, national, and global communities. In addition to methods for scaffolding students’ analysis of texts and topics, authors also offer a plethora of additional resources such as documentaries, canonical companions for study, connected music, and supplementary lesson plans.

This book is an essential resource for educators who want to introduce students to an array of social justice issues with texts that their students will actually want to read.  Containing strategies for teaching contemporary issues with some of the latest and most popular young adult titles, this text also shares strategies for infusing canonical works, music, and other young adult texts into instruction.  In each chapter the authors also provide websites, online videos, articles, and other electronic resources related to the text and topic discussed.  User friendly yet rigorous, Reading for Action is a must for experienced and new teachers alike who are invested in their students, social justice, and culturally responsive instruction.