ABSTRACT
Arthur Noble Applebee, in his survey of how literature gets taught in secondary schools, described the most common instructional practices in the teaching of literature. This chapter explores the inclusion of Beyoncé's work as well as other aspects of popular culture reflects the expanding definition of what "texts" are suitable for literary study. Students in secondary literature classrooms either focused on the formal attributes of traditional literary texts or they described and shared their affective responses to a text, responses that sprung from their own personal experiences. Teaching literary theory is not a repudiation of the goal of teaching adolescents to become better readers. Recent scholarship has prompted literature teachers to rethink what constitutes a text worthy of study in the literature classroom. Adolescents are now engaged in a variety of literate practices ranging from comics and graphica, adolescent novels, digital stories, slam poetry, social media texts, and a variety of other media.
