Language and Literacy Education Commons^™

We Need New Books, Liz Thackeray Nelson, Mandy Luszeck

The Utah English Journal

It’s College Day for incoming freshmen, and several English Department faculty and prospective students gather together for lunch to discuss English Department culture, tips for student success, and any other questions students have. Partway through, one freshman student asks what our favorite classical works are. My mind draws a blank, and I (Mandy) keep my mouth shut. It has been years since I have engaged in classic works. Or picked one up for that matter. I know the handful I taught in high school fairly well—To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby (so much Gatsby), The Crucible. …

Book Review: Big Jim And The White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined, Michael Handy

The Utah English Journal

Upon first opening this beautiful book, I regretted that my district may never approve it for my classroom. Policy in my school district prohibits classroom use of texts that use racial slurs. An initial author’s note uses a specific racial slur numerous times, repeating it throughout the book—always stricken when a character says it, but still appearing in scenery. This is a shame, because Big Jim and the White Boy is magnificent.

To Become More Fully Human, Mandy Luszeck, Rachel Knecht

The Utah English Journal

On September 10th, 2025, I joined a club I never wanted to join—the club of teaching at a school where an act of senseless gun violence took an individual’s life during hours meant for open dialogue and education. On the same day, the teachers at Evergreen High School also joined that club.

Engagement Is Not A Checklist, Michael S. Bowden

The Utah English Journal

A Familiar Classroom Scene

A teacher stands at the front of her classroom, mid-lesson, and scans the room to check for understanding. She sees what many teachers recognize in their classrooms every day: a sea of students, each seemingly in a different place. In the projector’s glow, she sees a few students intently taking notes on the lesson; a couple are scratching doodles on their page, one is staring straight ahead but not really interacting, and she can hear two more click-clacking on their keyboards as they are looking at something on their Chromebooks.

Four Feedback Tips For A Fifth Year, Annika Nielson

The Utah English Journal

Over the past four years of teaching writing, I’ve picked up a few lessons. One is that students will wait until the very last minute to submit a piece, no matter how much in-class drafting time I build into the schedule. Another is that many students see writing as big, bad, and boring: they have been trained to think that their writing will be corrected with red pens and long lists of mistakes.

Book Review: The Bletchley Riddle, Tiffany Bills

The Utah English Journal

Protagonist Lizzie Novis has many labels: half-Jewish, half-American, half-Polish-British, and precocious little sister. One label she refuses to adopt is orphan. The news of her mother’s presumed death upon Hitler’s invasion of Poland reaches her in 1939 London, but she refuses to let it reach her heart. She can’t believe her vibrant, independent mother Willa is not returning from an embassy assignment in Warsaw. She is determined to find out what happened to her, whether or not her older brother Jakob, busy with a mysterious new job, will help or not. But perhaps Jakob isn’t as clueless about Willa’s disappearance …

The Utah English Journal, Volume 54, 2026: Full Issue

The Utah English Journal

No abstract provided.

The State Of The State: Teacher Edition, Rena Lesué

The Utah English Journal

Mr. Cox clears his throat.

Do we have someone who can take the minutes?

Mrs. Weber? Please?

She tap-taps some papers into order

and pauses to peer down at

a dirty sketch on the surface

of the student desk she occupies.

One hand snakes into her canvas tote

and retrieves a hanky.

She spits into it and smudges

the drawing

into a grotesque

fingerprint.

Book Review: From The Editor, Jace Brown

The Utah English Journal

As I have worked with the reviewers on this edition of the Utah English Journal, I have found myself thinking often about community. I grew up in what was once a small town in central Utah, then moved to Ohio to pursue my PhD in Education. After graduating, I was beyond thrilled to accept a teaching position at Weber State University and return to my Utah community. It was with this perspective—of leaving, returning, and re-entering—that I began reflecting on the many communities in our lives: the communities where we grow up, the communities where we work, and the communities …

Book Review: A Most Perilous World: The True Story Of The Young Abolitionists And Their Crusade Against Slavery, Mercedes Allen

The Utah English Journal

A Most Perilous World brings the reader into the chaotic, tumultuous, and important days leading into the Civil War, during the war itself, and the Reconstruction Period (1854–1872). The book follows four lesser-known but vital historical figures: Lucy McKim, daughter of generational abolitionists; Lewis Douglass, the son of Frederick Douglass; George Garrison, son of abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison; and Charlotte Forten, daughter of free Blacks living in the north helping slaves to freedom. Though history remembers their parents more clearly, these young people prove that anyone, regardless of age, can make a difference—even when it seems hopeless.

Book Review: All The Noise At Once, Shalece Garff

The Utah English Journal

All the Noise at Once depicts the life of two incredibly close brothers. The eldest is the star quarterback and is being headhunted by universities across the nation (Brandon), while the other is living with autism and difficulties that come with it (Aiden). Unfortunately, many of the activities that he and his brother are involved in (school and football) are almost always crowded and filled with commotion, which sometimes leads Aiden to experience meltdowns when he is overstimulated with touch and noise. Being seen as different puts him on the outs with the other football players, who regard him as …

Book Review: When We Ride, Madalynn Belliston

The Utah English Journal

What do you do when someone you love makes choices that can harm your future? This is the challenge for Diego Benevides in Rex Ogle’s novel in verse, When We Ride. Nicknamed by his best friend Lawson, he goes by Benny to everyone but mom. The novel opens with Benny’s life flashing before his eyes as a gun is pointed directly at him.

Book Review: The Ballerina Of Auschwitz, Kourtney Amodio

The Utah English Journal

Dr. Edith Eger’s young adult memoir, The Ballerina of Auschwitz, is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of choosing how we respond to life’s darkest moments. As a sixteen-year-old Jewish ballerina, Edith was torn from her home in Hungary and sent to Auschwitz, where she endured unimaginable horrors, including being forced to dance for Josef Mengele on the night her parents were sent to the gas chambers. Yet this harrowing beginning is only part of her story. Edith’s journey from concentration camp survivor to renowned psychologist offers readers profound insights into trauma, …

Book Review: The Other Side Of Tomorrow, Adam Hellewell

The Utah English Journal

Yunho and Myunghee, the young protagonists of The Other Side of Tomorrow, written in verse by Tina Cho and illustrated by Deb JJ Lee, have not experienced a traditional happy childhood. For them, North Korea is the backdrop of their impoverished, lonely, and brutal adolescence.

Book Review: Pursuing Language And Metalinguistics In K-12 Classrooms: A Framework For Critical Engagement, Leah Day

The Utah English Journal

The linguistic diversity that exists in many classrooms in the United States, and Utah more specifically, creates the perfect opportunity for teachers and students to discuss the intersection between power, language, and identity. As the number of multilingual learners in our classrooms increases, the need for these talks grows more and more urgent. This book offers extensive professional development for practitioners hoping to incorporate more discussions of language and linguistic awareness in their classrooms with their students. It is an overview of a wide variety of research as well as practical applications in a teaching context. Throughout, there is an …

Book Review: Under The Same Stars, Sara Tesch

The Utah English Journal

On the front of the hardcover edition, acclaimed YA author Libba Bray intrigues the reader with three simple, telegraphic sentences: “Three rebels. Two murders. A century of secrets.” Using three distinct timelines, Bray creates a young adult novel perfect for fans of historical fiction and mysteries. Elements of young adult realism are also present within Bray’s 2025 novel, a Good Morning America Young Adult Book Club pick. Under the Same Stars brings the reader on a journey of self-discovery, mystery, and sacrifice in 1940s Germany, 1980s West Germany, and 2020 New York, stricken with COVID-19.

Book Review: J Vs. K, Miranda Folau

The Utah English Journal

J Vs. K is an engaging story about two fifth-grade boys who find themselves in a rivalry over the school competition to create the “best story”. The story begins when K, a new student, gains attention for his natural writing abilities. This is a threat to J, who dislikes reading and writing, but loves to draw. J has been so excited to enter the storytelling contest at school and has been dreaming of his year to shine and win, bringing fame to the fifth-grade class. The boys quickly find themselves in competition, and become very self-conscious as outside acknowledgements of …

Teaching Students To Write For The Future By Writing For The Present, Amber Jensen, Meridith Reed

The Utah English Journal

“When you get to eighth grade, you’ll need to know how to write a topic sentence.”

“The five-paragraph essay will prepare you to write in high school.”

“College professors expect you to accurately cite your sources in MLA format.”

“When you graduate from college, you need to be able to write a professional email.”

Perhaps you heard messages like these from your writing teachers as you moved through middle school, high school, college, and into your careers. We certainly did. And perhaps, like we have, you have been a writing teacher in a middle school, high school, or college classroom …

The Future Of The English Class Essay: Reimagining Multimodal Composition In The Chatgpt Era, Taylor Rose-Dougherty, Christy Goldsmith

The Utah English Journal

As English teacher educators, we are on the frontlines of navigating the technological elephant in the 2025 writing classroom: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini that can produce pages of text in mere seconds. English teachers’ philosophies on GenAI are as diverse as their preferred novels or their favorite poets. But, as the two dozen publications in major English education journals1 in the past two years suggest, what is at stake is not the end of high school English (Herman, 2022), but the opportunity to give it a makeover (Herman, 2023) by reimagining what writing experiences …

Beyond The Book Report: Finding Student Voice Through Podcasting, Gaby Dawson, Johnny Allred

The Utah English Journal

“Mrs. Dawson, I never want to write another essay again,” a student groaned after class, clearly worn out by the end-of-term pileup of assignments. As a student teacher in a ninth-grade English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, Gaby could relate to her student’s fatigue— she only had one last reading unit to plan and teach before the end of the semester. However, with thoughts of winter break at the forefront of her students’ minds, Gaby noticed it was getting increasingly difficult to keep them engaged. To finish the semester strong, she needed a high-interest project and summative assessment that could reenergize …

Building Classroom Community With Picturebooks, Deborah Dean

The Utah English Journal

I started my first teaching job in January, after my 7th- and 8th-grade students had had a series of substitute teachers for the entire first semester of the school year. It was rough. An administrative problem that took months to resolve left these students feeling as if no one cared about them. And the series of subs, as well-meaning as they might have been, had not had long-term connections to ensure that these students learned or even paid attention. I tried a lot of ways to get and keep students engaged in those first weeks. A lot. But the first …

Challenging The Stereotypical Latina In Elizabeth Acevedo's Clap When You Land And The Poet X, Victoria Olsen Yates

The Utah English Journal

Book banning has become a trigger phrase in the United States, and schools have become book-banning hubs. In the 2023–2024 school year, PEN America recorded 10,046 book bans. Among the most commonly banned books, 44% included people of color (BIPOC) and 39% included LGBTQ+ individuals (Meehan, Baêta, Markham, & Magnusson, 2024). Banning books harms marginalized youth because they will not see themselves in literature, causing them to have a distorted view of the world. Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) explains this further in her idea that books can serve as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Bishop illustrates how books can …

Incorporating Texts With People With Disabilities Amidst Scripted Curricula, Kayleigh Kearsley

The Utah English Journal

As I prepare for student teaching this spring, the topic on my and my peers’ minds is scripted curriculum. For emerging teachers, it can be intimidating to determine how to balance the best teaching practices developed in coursework with scripted curriculum, while simultaneously fostering an authentic learning community within my classroom walls. With the rise of scripted curriculum across the state and nation (Kang, 2016), this is becoming an increasingly complex situation to navigate. These curricular resources affect teacher choice, requiring educators to become that much more intentional with the choices they make. An important way to ensure we are …

After All, Megan Russell

The Utah English Journal

After all the voices of the day have quieted down,

I think.

After all the pencils have been lost, some sharpened

to nubs, others scattered through the hall,

I wonder.

After all the paper has been crumpled and used up,

I ponder.

Centering Ai Literacy: Exploring Brazilian International Students’ Perceptions Of Chatgpt And Peer Tutoring, Leigh Ann Dunning, Raissa Borges De Oliveira Leal

The Writing Center Journal

For English as an Additional Language (EAL) students, generative AI (GenAI) offers meaningful support for writing in English, while also introducing a new set of challenges. Supporting EAL students in developing AI literacy is crucial to their growth as confident, adaptable writers, and writing center tutors are uniquely positioned to facilitate this development. This case study explores the experiences of undergraduate Brazilian international students at a small liberal arts college who received writing feedback from both peer writing center tutors and ChatGPT. Findings indicate that students valued the human connection, contextual understanding, and rhetorical support offered by peer tutors, while …

Front Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Front matter for The Writing Center Journal 43:3 (2025).

The Myth Of Revising By Ear: Does It Help Multilingual Writers?, Soo Hyon Kim

The Writing Center Journal

This study examines what multilingual writers notice while they read their writing aloud, and whether reading aloud helps improve the accuracy of their writing during revision. It also investigates whether multilingual writers’ second language (L2) proficiency influences the extent to which reading aloud impacts revision. To address these questions, a counterbalanced, mixed design study was carried out with two experimental conditions: revising while reading aloud and revising while reading silently. Multilingual writers of higher and lower English proficiency at a large research university participated in a two-day sequence of composition and revision, two times, over the course of two weeks. …

Attending To Present Others: A Framework For Supporting Multilingual Graduate Writers, María P. Carvajal Regidor, Allison Kranek

The Writing Center Journal

Extending prior work on present others, individuals who are not physically present in writing center sessions—such as advisors, colleagues, and peers—but who directly or indirectly impact what happens during consultations (Kranek & Carvajal Regidor, 2021), we argue that attending to present others is one way to more holistically support multilingual graduate writers. Based on data from session recordings, we contend that present others can be used as a framework to train consultants to better address the specific needs of this student population by acknowledging their socialization processes, feedback networks, language needs, and emotions. Then, we share two approaches to consultant …

Native-Speakerism And Multilingual Student Anxiety In One-To-One Mentoring, Grace Lee-Amuzie

The Writing Center Journal

While one-to- one writing tutoring is often viewed as a supportive space for student writers, it can also reproduce racialized linguistic hierarchies that exacerbate anxiety for multilingual students. This article examines second language (L2) anxiety as a structurally induced emotional response to native-speakerism— the ideology that privileges white, Anglophone, native English speakers as the standard for language competence. Drawing from L2 anxiety research in applied linguistics and writing center studies, the article explores how native-speakerism influences multilingual students’ self-perception, interaction, and performance in L2 during one-to- one tutoring. It discusses the sources and dimensions of L2 anxiety across all four …

Engaging Transnational Writing Assets In The Writing Center: New Pedagogical Directions For Supporting International Multilingual Students, Olalekan T. Adepoju

The Writing Center Journal

This article argues for a shift in writing center pedagogy toward prioritizing transnational writing assets as the basis of our work with international multilingual writers specifically and every writer we encounter generally. While writing center scholarship has paid attention to the influences of language, cultural and rhetorical differences among native and non-native English speakers/ tutors in the writing center, much of this discussion has taken the “comparative” route rather than a “trans-d” (transnational) route with potentials to transform our engagements with scholars, students, and writers from other parts of the world. This IRB-approved research reveals that international multilingual writers possess …