Prof and student to present research

Northwestern College senior Tanya Woodward, Broken Bow, Neb., and English professor Kim Van Es are part of a panel presentation at the annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of English, held Nov. 15–18 in Las Vegas.

The panel, titled “Daring to Dream: Beginning Teachers and Teacher Educators Keeping Young Adult Literature Alive in the Secondary English Classroom,” includes English professors and their students or former students who share strategies for promoting reading among high school students.

Woodward and Van Es will present an approach called “Procuring a Performance Repertoire,” which includes collecting book cards that catalog information about books teachers can then recommend to young adult readers.

The book cards can be used to perform book talks, a presentation by the teacher that serves as a promotional “trailer” for books students should consider.

Van Es taught the course Teaching Literature to Adolescents, in which students learned how to procure a performance repertoire, and Woodward, an English teaching major, used the strategies while teaching in Indonesia this past summer.

Panel participants with Woodward and Van Es include English teaching professors and their students from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Winthrop University, Fort Mill, S.C.