Adolescents on the Edge: Stories and Lessons to Transform Learning

"Literacy is freedom and everyone has something significant to say."
-Jimmy Santiago Baca

Fusing Jimmy Santiago Baca's talents as a writer of memoir with ReLeah Cossett Lent's expertise in building and empowering classroom communities, Adolescents on the Edge offers a completely new approach to reaching at-risk adolescents. Centered around conflicts and life-altering choices, Baca's gripping personal narratives-delivered through short stories and live-from-the-classroom videos-will resonate with students and provide rich opportunities for them to reflect on their own decision making. Through these stories and their accompanying activities, students witness the power of literacy and learn that their power, too, lives in the words they speak, write, and share with others.

Adolescents on the Edge components

- The complete teacher's book, Adolescents on the Edge, describes the elements and professional understandings needed to cultivate transformative learning environments. After detailing the role of trust and dialogue in creating a classroom community, ReLeah presents proven strategies for engaging and motivating students.

The second half of the teacher's book provides new stories Jimmy has written especially for adolescents. Each story is reproducible and is supported by teaching strategies.

- An accompanying DVD welcomes your students into a real classroom to watch master storyteller Jimmy Baca in action. After the stories teachers can watch Jimmy and ReLeah lead students in follow-up lessons and reflect on their own practice.

The 10 stories from the teacher's book are also available in an optional book for students. Stories from the Edge enriches and extends Baca's critically acclaimed memoir A Place to Stand. In addition, Jimmy has written three more stories for students to read independently.

Save $ with a Teacher Pack .

ReLeah Cossett Lent was a middle and high school teacher before becoming a founding member of a statewide literacy project at the University of Central Florida. She is now an international consultant, writing and speaking about adolescent literacy, Common Core, and school leadership. Her latest book is Overcoming Textbook Fatigue: 21st Century Tools to Invigorate Learning (ASCD).

ReLeah's work with Jimmy Santiago Baca, award-winning poet and writer, led to a book and CD for reaching at-risk adolescents, Adolescents on the Edge, Stories and Lessons to Transform Learning (Heinemann). She has also written Keep Them Reading: An Anti-Censorship Guide for Educators and Literacy for Real: Reading, Thinking and Learning in the Content Areas (Teachers College Press), Engaging Adolescent Learners and Literacy Learning Communities (Heinemann). ReLeah's first two books, co-authored with Gloria Pipkin and published by Heinemann won the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Award and the NCTE/Slate Intellectual Freedom Award. ReLeah was also the recipient of the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award in 1999. You can find her at www.releahlent.com.

As an abandoned child and a runaway Jimmy Santiago Baca's childhood was spent on the margins of society. In early adulthood he reverted again and again to a life of crime, eventually being sentenced to five years in a maximum-security prison. After years of hellish suffering on administrative segregation and in isolation, he emerges from prison a voracious reader and a skilled, self-taught writer. He miraculously discovers a deep attachment to poetry that becomes his saving grace.

Now an accomplished and celebrated author, Baca is the recipient of many honors including the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and for his memoir, A Place to Stand, he received the prestigious International Prize. In 2006 he won the Cornelius P. Turner Award, a national award that annually recognizes one GED graduate who has made outstanding contributions to society in education, justice, health, public service, and social welfare.

Devoting his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship, Baca has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities. In 2005 he created Cedar Tree, Inc., a nonprofit foundation dedicated to helping others improve their lives through education.

Other books by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Poetry
Selected Poems/Poemas Selectos
Rita and Julia
Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande
Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande
C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans
Healing Earthquakes
Que Linda La Brisa/How Beautiful the Breeze Is
Immigrants in Our Own Land
Black Mesa Poems
Martin and Meditations on the South Valley

Short Stories and Essays
Adolescents on the Edge / Stories from the Edge
Working in the Dark
The Importance of a Piece of Paper
Breaking Bread with Darkness

Novel
A Glass of Water

Memoir
A Place to Stand

Film
Blood In/Blood Out
Late Blossoms
Lost Voices
Moving the River Back Home