R. Joseph Rodríguez
R. Joseph Rodríguez is a poet and literacy educator and researcher in the Texas Hill Country, USA.
He has been teaching and writing since the 1900s and is the author of academic articles, book chapters, personal essays, narrative poems, and the following books:
• Scribes at Work: Telling the Writing Lives of Teens and Their Teacher (2027) (forthcoming)
• A Glorious Fire: Poems (2026) (forthcoming)
• Youth Scribes: Teaching a Love of Writing (Heinemann, 2025)
• This Is Our Summons Now: Poems (FlowerSong Press, 2022)
• Teaching Culturally Sustaining and Inclusive Young Adult Literature: Critical Perspectives and Conversations (Routledge, 2019)
• Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites (Bloomsbury, 2017).
His recent projects include manuscripts on the cultures of reading, selected poems about the 21st century, and adolescent scribes in an early college high school.
Dr. Rodríguez has taught English and Spanish language arts in public schools, community colleges, and universities. His areas of research include young people's literatures, language acquisition, and socially responsible biliteracies. He is a former editor (2018–2023) of English Journal, a publication founded in 1912 by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
With his colleagues and students, Dr. Rodríguez reads banned, challenged, censored, and confiscated books.
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Supervisors: Clara Román-Odio, R. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, José E. Limón, and Liliana Minaya-Rowe
Phone: +1-512-806-1132
He has been teaching and writing since the 1900s and is the author of academic articles, book chapters, personal essays, narrative poems, and the following books:
• Scribes at Work: Telling the Writing Lives of Teens and Their Teacher (2027) (forthcoming)
• A Glorious Fire: Poems (2026) (forthcoming)
• Youth Scribes: Teaching a Love of Writing (Heinemann, 2025)
• This Is Our Summons Now: Poems (FlowerSong Press, 2022)
• Teaching Culturally Sustaining and Inclusive Young Adult Literature: Critical Perspectives and Conversations (Routledge, 2019)
• Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites (Bloomsbury, 2017).
His recent projects include manuscripts on the cultures of reading, selected poems about the 21st century, and adolescent scribes in an early college high school.
Dr. Rodríguez has taught English and Spanish language arts in public schools, community colleges, and universities. His areas of research include young people's literatures, language acquisition, and socially responsible biliteracies. He is a former editor (2018–2023) of English Journal, a publication founded in 1912 by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
With his colleagues and students, Dr. Rodríguez reads banned, challenged, censored, and confiscated books.
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Supervisors: Clara Román-Odio, R. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, José E. Limón, and Liliana Minaya-Rowe
Phone: +1-512-806-1132
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“Let me just write already!” says one student to another.
What makes a student want to write? How can we help students with long-held aversions to writing come to view writing as an invitation to create, to become, and to belong?
In Youth Scribes: Teaching a Love of Writing, R. Joseph Rodríguez argues that when we build adolescents’ scribal identities—writers with diverse abilities, backgrounds, cultures, and interests—we reveal the power they hold to practice writing that is meaningful and relevant to their lives and the world. Once students come to view themselves as scribes, they understand why their writing matters. The word scribe refers not only to the ancient practice that predates the printing of writing and the creation of manuscripts and maps, but also to modern forms of communication that call for editing, transcription, and interpretation to show understanding across various audiences, cultures, disciplines, modes, and situations.
Five guiding principles for writing as a scribal act provide a framework that includes:
How to help students understand their scribal roles
How to support youth scribes to tell their stories
How to maintain scribal cultures of writing with inquiry
How to teach students to write forever and across audiences
Youth Scribes includes selections from literary works that complement the habits of youth scribes, while “A Scribe in Action” microessays by master teachers and authors demystify scribal identities, acts, and behaviors.
Adolescents want to write from their lived experiences. They want to serve as interpreters and translators of their cultures, expressing themselves on the page to hear themselves and to be heard, seen, and understood.
As teachers, we can guide our students to a love of writing that is essential, just, necessary, and timeless. Youth scribes. Write on.
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R. Joseph Rodríguez is a secondary language arts teacher at William Charles Akins Early College High School in Austin, Texas. He is the author of numerous books including Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites, Teaching Culturally Sustaining and Inclusive Young Adult Literature: Critical Perspectives and Conversations, and This Is Our Summons Now: Poems.
Joseph is a former editor of NCTE’s English Journal, founder of the literacy initiative Libre con Libros, and a reader of banned and challenged books.
A framework for building adolescents’ identities as scribes—writers from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and interests who write from their lived experiences. How to transform reluctant writers into students who want to write as translators and interpreters of their culture.
About the Author
R. Joseph Rodríguez is a secondary language arts teacher at William Charles Akins Early College High School in Austin, Texas. He is the author of numerous books including Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites, Teaching Culturally Sustaining and Inclusive Young Adult Literature: Critical Perspectives and Conversations, and This Is Our Summons Now: Poems. Joseph is a former editor of NCTE’s English Journal, founder of the literacy initiative Libre con Libros, and a reader of banned and challenged books.
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Author
R. Joseph Rodríguez
Narrator
R. Joseph Rodríguez
Publisher
Heinemann
Published on
Aug 18, 2025
ISBN
9798228669796
Best for
web, tablet, phone
Duration
7h 14m 2s
Export option
Available
Genres
Education / General
Genres
Education / Professional Development
Genres
Education / Schools / Levels / Secondary
The first edition of Acts of Resistance: Subversive Teaching in the English Language Arts (ELA) Classroom won the 2021 Society of Professors of Education's Outstanding Book Award and garnered other nominations.
The second edition includes a foreword by Ashley Hope Pérez, author of the young adult literature novel Out of Darkness, one of the most frequently banned books across U.S. classrooms.
Four new chapters reflect sociopolitical changes since the book's publication, including a widespread, coordinated uptick in the banning of books centering authors and characters from marginalized communities; the COVID-19 pandemic and with it, increased acts of violence against folks identifying as Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander; the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other victims of police brutality; the January 6th insurrection; the closing of the Trump era; the passing of anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation; and a "school choice" movement that defunds public schools, deprofessionalizes educators, and places democracy in peril.
Chapters specifically illustrate the storied practices of subversive teachers across the 6-12 ELA context. They provide educators with instructional ideas on how to do anti-oppressive work while also meeting traditional ELA disciplinary elements.
Given the perpetuation of heteronormativity in the educational system, Haggerty encourages instructors to help LGBT students "learn about the politics of oppression in their own lives as well as in the cultural context that, after all, determines what they mean when they call themselves lesbian or gay."
Approaches to Teaching LGBT Literature is designed to help teachers address what it means to teach LGBT literature. How can pre-service teacher educators prepare their students to teach LGBT literature? How should teachers introduce different bodies of students to these texts?
Those interested in starting LGBT-themed courses and/ or thinking about how LGBT literatures might fit into the broader undergraduate curriculum will benefit from this scholarship addressing the history and evolution of LGBT literature courses in different contexts and providing a diverse set of example courses, projects, and activities that would help an array of faculty to implement such courses on their campuses.
William P. Banks (PhD, Illinois State University) is Professor of English at East Carolina University, where he teaches courses in writing, research, pedagogy, LGBT literature, and young adult literature. His essays on queer rhetorics and LGBT and young adult literatures have appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, and English Journal.
John Pruitt (PhD, Ohio University) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Rock County and editor of Wisconsin English Journal. His publications on LGBT pedagogy have appeared in journals such as College English and Teaching English in the Two-Year College.
This book provides an outline for the study of literature through cultural and literary criticism, via essays that analyze selected YA literature (drama, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) in four areas: scribal identities and the self-affirmation of adolescents; gender and sexualities; schooling and education of young adult characters; and teachers’ roles and influences in characters’ coming of age.
Applying critical literacy theories and a youth studies lens, this book shines a light on the need for culturally sustaining and inclusive pedagogies to read adolescent worlds.
Complementing these essays are critical conversations with seven key contemporary YA literature writers, adding biographical perspectives to further expand the critical scholarship and merits of YA literature.
Language, Culture, and Teaching Series
Sonia Nieto, Series Editor
By exploring the teacher construct, readers are able to consider how popular fiction and film have influenced society’s understandings and views of classroom teachers.
Organized around four main themes—Identifying with the Teacher Image; Constructing the Teacher with Content; Imaging the Teacher as Savior; The Teacher Construct as Commentary—the chapters examine the complicated mixture of fact, stereotype and misrepresentation that create the image of the teacher in the public eye today.
This examination, in turn, allows teacher educators to use popular culture as curriculum. Using the fictional teacher as a text, preservice—and practicing—teachers can examine positive and negative (and often misleading) representations of teachers in order to develop as teachers themselves.
Others are much newer, such as computerized essay scoring or gamification. Some ideas, such as the supposed demise of literacy brought on by texting, are newer bad ideas but are really instances of older bad ideas about literacy always being in a cycle of decline. Yet the same core questions such as what is good writing, what makes a good writer, how should writing be assessed, and the like persist across contexts, technologies, and eras.
The project has its genesis in frustration, but what emerges is hope: hope for leaving aside bad ideas and thinking about writing in more productive, inclusive, and useful ways.
Generation BULLIED 2.0 details the nature of bullying as a tremendously negative force in schools today and offers practical, research-based strategies for constructing and cultivating cultures that support learning, safety, and dignity for everyone.
Analyzing the nature and inadequacy of current anti-bullying policies, Generation BULLIED 2.0 explores how stereotyping and other negative behaviors are reinforced and sustained in both large and small ways at school. Its critical narratives of commonly bullied individuals and groups are representative of events that transpire every day across the country’s education system.
Focusing on the most common targets of bullying: race, gender, sexual orientation, physical appearance, physical and mental disability, and cyber-abuse, this book does not offer simplistic solutions. Instead, it offers empowerment to readers while providing tools for elevating social justice and preventing bullying from taking root as a supposedly «normal» part of life in our society.
Series: Gender and Sexualities in Education, Volume 1