Collaborative Explorations of Character Experience: Reading Actively in Middle Grade Language Arts is a must read for middle grade language arts educators, practitioners, policy makers, and parents! This book is incredibly thoughtful, one of kind, and a special gift to help middle grade language arts' classrooms with vivid examples, stories, and theory behind them. It offers lessons about reading development, school readings, and reading classrooms within and beyond the middle grades. Highly recommended.
--Ting Huang, assistant professor, department of curriculum and instruction, William and Mary School of Education
Don K. Philpot builds upon his impressive scholarship on the place and value of literature to support instruction. This book provides much-needed guidance for educators to elevate text conversations that focus on characterization. Philpot shares in-depth summaries, questions, and tools for planning engaging literacy lessons to extend the reader's comprehension. Using a balance of classic and contemporary novels, Philpot provides practical ways to deepen readers' engagement with characters by including thought-provoking questions and a framework to gain an intimate understanding of characters. Collaborative Explorations of Character Experience is a valuable resource for educators, literacy specialists, and all who care about supporting deeper literary connections with readers.
--Mary Napoli, associate professor of education and reading, Penn State Harrisburg
Don K. Philpot offers unique and targeted strategies for teaching critically acclaimed books, encouraging teachers to instill higher-order thinking and promoting active involvement in the texts that middle schoolers read. The focus on the character experience provides educators specific ways to guide readers to identify with and relate to protagonists in complex texts--an invaluable resource for the language arts professional development library.
--Lilly Steiner, associate professor, School of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Monmouth University
Dr. Philpot's Collaborative Explorations of Character Experience: Reading Actively in Middle Grade Language Arts provides a framework for engaging in the analysis of fictional characters with middle school students (grades 6 - 8). He uses well recognized books and authors to illustrate the range of questions teachers and students may explore as they come to understand the characters. This approach makes the characters relatable as students build relationships and, most importantly, empathy with them and their situations. Students will connect their own stories to those of the characters as they come to understand people and places in deeper and more meaningful ways.
--Jacqueline Edmondson PhD, chancellor and chief academic officer, professor of education, Penn State University, Greater Allegheny
In Collaborative Explorations of Character Experience: Reading Actively in Middle Grade Language Arts, Philpot offers middle grade ELA teachers an argument for moving away from typical novel studies and toward sustained explorations and analyses of character experiences through award-winning and frequently taught middle grade novels. Specifically, he provides a range of novels, diverse characters, guiding questions, and example analyses, all of which can be adapted for unique middle grade classrooms and contexts. Ultimately, Philpot's book offers relevant and tangible ways to use reading instruction to help students in the middle grades to better understand others and, by connection, to better understand themselves. This book is a helpful addition to any 6-8 grade ELA teacher's resource library.
--Mike P. Cook, associate professor of English Education, Auburn University; co-author of "Exploring Identity Development and Self: Teaching Universal Themes through Young Adult Novels" and "Exploring Relationships and Connections to Others: Teaching Universal Themes through Young Adult Novels"
