“An emphasis on book choice is crucial in creating a balance between freedom and structure for students within a language arts curriculum. Students need a basic structure to serve as a foundation for their learning. A strong curriculum provides a launching pad to expand students’ conversations about issues that matter in their lives and futures. In order to match the reading abilities and individual interests of a diverse student population, I provide a wide array of texts about activism for my students to read throughout this unit. Offering book choice alone is not sufficient in teaching literacy. Integrated within the use of book choice, I directly teach reading strategies. By teaching students to analyze, compare and contrast and question diverse texts, they not only begin to understand how others think and write about activism, but also how activism touches their own lives.”

from the chapter “Book Choice” in Stirring Up Justice: Writing and Reading to Change the World by Jessica Singer