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Frequently, when I assign autobiographical essays to students (typically at the start of a semester), they respond with two contradictory yet equally potent responses-eagerness to discuss their favorite subject (themselves) accompanied by apathy toward composing yet another version of an assignment they have encountered numerous times in their academic careers. Perhaps the source of their antipathy lies in their limited life experience. Having not yet lived beyond their adolescence and having experienced life within the constraints of adolescent agency, just how interesting might they consider their own lives? According to Adolescent Literacy: A Policy Research Brief, adolescents rely on literacy in their identity development, using reading and writing to define themselves as persons. Moreover, discourse that allows students to envision themselves in the future can assist them in leveraging the development of identities and agency specific to practices and activities situated in historically contingent, socially enacted, culturally constructed worlds.

My students' experience with slam poetry was not unique. In fact, as a teaching strategy, performance poetry has been used in classrooms across the United States, traversing content areas and extracurricular activities. Both as an instrument for literacy development and as a tool for exploring issues of culture and identity, slam poetry has served as a contemporary supplement to traditional poetry units. Furthermore, slam poetry clubs and organizations have formed in and outside of classrooms to provide an outlet for creative expression and individual voice. Maxine Greene, a pioneer in curriculum studies, challenges us to consider the moral and political questions surrounding educational practice rather than adhere to stringent, fixed norms. Building on Greene's work, Pamela Bolotin Joseph contends that for teachers to understand the culture of their classrooms, they must break from the rigid routines of traditional schoolhouse customs and practices.

The senior year program at my school is elective-based, allowing students to select an English course that will immerse them in a specific genre or theme. I am one of several instructors who teach Senior Writers Seminar, a yearlong intensive writing class designed for students who want to strengthen their writing foundation by experimenting with the literary techniques of creative nonfiction. Students are the generative agents in the class; they continuously craft and submit essays for feedback, and the focus is on process, not product. Formal and informal writing activities allow learners to experiment within a wide range of genres: college, exploratory, causal, place essays, dialogues, and literary analyses are just a sampling of what they explore. While the desire to be a better writer is often the impetus for students to take the course, most are overwhelmed-downright afraid-when tasked with using their own lives as source material and having to share it with classmates.

When we began working together to conduct research in Holly's classroom because of our shared interest in literacy instruction with high school English learners, Holly's frustrations underscored Mandy's experience that the prepackaged secondary English as a Second Language (ESL) curriculum used in many classrooms does not effectively engage students or further their English acquisition. This article shares our story of creating a curriculum we believe other teachers can emulate to successfully teach adolescents who are new to the country. The curriculum is based on students' lives and stories. Understanding newcomers' unique potential and challenges (Stewart 95), we generated our own curriculum based on the rich experiences of the diverse students in Holly's ESL classes. This included thirty-seven students from seven different countries with English language abilities ranging from beginning to high intermediate. The most obvious need for newcomers is to acquire English. They need to develop fluency and accuracy in all four language domains: reading, writing, listening, and speaking in their second language

In November 2016, Jasmine, an eleventh-grade student, circulated a letter among her classmates (student names in this article are pseudonyms). Talk of the recent election had permeated their urban public high school, and many students expressed combinations of fear, anger, and numbness at the result. As many of you know, her letter began, Donald J. Trump will be the next president of the US, and I thought I'd let you know a couple of things.\" Jasmine proceeded to offer affirmation for the diverse identities that comprised the school community. Because the ability and will to bring personal histories into school is unevenly distributed-empowering some, while leaving others feeling exposed-English teachers face the challenge of navigating this tension. Educators must take seriously students' needs both for relevant curricula and for pedagogies that do not reproduce already existing vulnerability.

The year was 1999. I had graduated from a teacher education program where I was trained to teach writing in the style of Nancie Atwell, Linda Rief, and Donald Graves. It was the height of the writing process movement (Tobin and Newkirk). I was beginning my career as an English teacher at an urban high school in the northwest. At this time, biography-driven writing was, by no means, the only kind of writing taught in schools; however, it was an accepted piece of the formal ELA writing curriculum (Gillespie). My curriculum was no exception. That year, and the years that followed, I asked students to produce a diverse range of written genres, many of which invited them to write from their lived experiences, ideas, cultures, stories, and values. While some students found the memoir essay more meaningful than others, all completed the assignment for Tracy and shared a strong sense of voice, perspective, vulnerability, and confidence in their writing.

Storytelling can help youth, families, and communities make sense of their experiences, allowing them to process the past and plan their futures. The practice of storytelling in biographical learning, we argue, can be especially powerful when working with youth of color and Indigenous youth-children whose biographies are often misrepresented or unrepresented in the stories they see in the classroom. In this article, drawing on our work with Nuestros Cuentos, a community-driven storytelling program, we present storytelling as a method for reflection, resistance, and community-building with Latinx and Indigenous youth. The Nuestros Cuentos program takes place in Nkwejong-an Anishinaabemowin word used to refer to the approximate areas of Lansing and East Lansing, Michigan. Meaning where the rivers meet, Nkwejong has long been an important meeting place for Indigenous people, and the area has in recent decades seen an influx of Latinx and Indigenous people pursuing work in factories and as migrant farmworkers.

Every time we ask students to write about themselves or their communities, we are asking them to be vulnerable. We are asking them to examine the world in which they live, break down their protective walls, and expose themselves to the feelings that result from the broken barriers. Therefore, when we ask students to write, we are asking them to be courageous enough to share their truths with us, despite the intense level of openness required to do so. Yet, even though it requires students to be vulnerable, writing enables them to name problems they face, to show adults assets where we might see deficits, and to reframe who they are. This idea of writing as a vulnerable yet beneficial practice drives the work of the Deep Center, a nonprofit organization in Savannah, Georgia. Deep was created with the mission to empower young people to thrive as learners, community leaders, and agents of change.

Erik Erikson suggests that the development of a sense of self is one of the primary processes of adolescence. In today's world, adolescents must work to negotiate a multiplicity of deleterious narratives regarding their identities and their worth. Whether they are undocumented students faced with xenophobic messages, LGBTQ students existing within pervasive heteronormativity, African American students exposed to the normalizing of police brutality, female students contending with backlash in the #MeToo era, students dealing with economic oppression, or the harm invisible to teachers that students who seem the most protected are often suffering, students face many strategies of shaming. In their guest editorship for the English Journal (EJ) issue titled \"Writing Is Power: Helping Students Craft Their Worlds,\" Vicki McQuitty and Pamela Hickey called for stories of classrooms where students engage in authentic, world-changing writing. In fact, EJ often brings attention to powerful examples of English classrooms where critical pedagogies engage youth in using and producing texts to rewrite worlds and elevate critical consciousness.

As a high school English teacher, I have found that asking my students for midterm self-reflections helps them to be more attuned to their distinct educational trajectories. Their comments also provide useful insights into adjustments that I can make as a teacher, since learning about their interests, joys, and challenges in the classroom helps me reorient and expand my curricular practices. I have shifted, for instance, to accommodate more in-class writing and to include active energizers that facilitate intergroup dialogue. In addition, I responded to my students' desire for creative writing and alternative forms of assessments by centering a poetry unit around the production of students' work rather than a formal analysis of established pieces. When conversations about English language learners are oriented around supposed deficiencies, educators and scholars attenuate the potential for youth development and self-actualization.