Jason Griffith
Jason Griffith is an assistant professor of education (children’s and adolescent literature studies) at Penn State University. He earned a doctorate in English education from Arizona State University in 2018 after teaching middle and high school English for 12 years in Carlisle, PA. His research interests include writing pedagogy, adolescent literature, multimodal text intersections, particularly in narrative nonfiction and storytelling, and empowering literacy practices for middle and secondary students as well as pre-service teachers. In 2012, Jason was awarded NCTE’s Outstanding Middle Level Educator award, and he has served on NCTE’s Middle Level Section Steering Committee.
A National Board Certified Teacher and Fellow of the National Writing Project, Jason has received a number of teaching awards including a Teaching Excellence Award from Arizona State University's Graduate Professional Student Association (2016), and the Wilfred A. Ferrell Memorial Fellowship From Arizona State University's Department of English (2017).
Jason has presented at national conferences including NCTE, ELATE, SXSWedu, and the Educator Collaborative's Gathering as well as regional and local conferences. Jason's first book, From Me to We: Using Narrative Nonfiction to Broaden Student Perspectives, was published in Fall, 2016 by Routledge, and his scholarship has also been published The Clearinghouse, Voices from the Middle, the Language Arts Journal of Michigan, New Jersey English Journal as well as collected volumes published by the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) and Rowman & Littlefield. Jason also has written essays, reviews, and creative nonfiction for Hippocampus Magazine, the Nerdy Book Club, Talking Writing, and the Pennsylvania Council of the Teachers of English Language Arts (PCTELA) blog.
A National Board Certified Teacher and Fellow of the National Writing Project, Jason has received a number of teaching awards including a Teaching Excellence Award from Arizona State University's Graduate Professional Student Association (2016), and the Wilfred A. Ferrell Memorial Fellowship From Arizona State University's Department of English (2017).
Jason has presented at national conferences including NCTE, ELATE, SXSWedu, and the Educator Collaborative's Gathering as well as regional and local conferences. Jason's first book, From Me to We: Using Narrative Nonfiction to Broaden Student Perspectives, was published in Fall, 2016 by Routledge, and his scholarship has also been published The Clearinghouse, Voices from the Middle, the Language Arts Journal of Michigan, New Jersey English Journal as well as collected volumes published by the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) and Rowman & Littlefield. Jason also has written essays, reviews, and creative nonfiction for Hippocampus Magazine, the Nerdy Book Club, Talking Writing, and the Pennsylvania Council of the Teachers of English Language Arts (PCTELA) blog.
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Books by Jason Griffith
Engaging your students in the reading of a nonfiction narrative with collaborative chapter notes, empathy check-ins, and a mini-research paper to deepen students’ understanding;
Helping your students identify meaningful life events, recount their experiences creatively, and construct effective opening and closing lines for their personal essays;
Encouraging your students to use dialogue, outside research, and a clear plot structure to make their narrative nonfiction more compelling and polished.
The strategies in this book are supplemented by examples of student work and snapshots from the author’s own classroom. The book also includes interviews with narrative nonfiction writers MK Asante and Johanna Bear. The appendices offer additional tips for using narrative nonfiction in English class, text and online resources for teaching narrative nonfiction, and a correlation chart between the activities in this book and the Common Core Standards.
Articles by Jason Griffith
Design/methodology/approach-Informed theoretically by the Youth Lens, which considers how texts reinforce and/or disrupt various figurations of adolescence and youth, this study uses a multistage qualitative analysis of 83 youth memoir published in nine volumes of the Best Teen Writing from 2010 to 2018. First, the authors conducted a Labovian plot analysis to consider what themes and topics were present as well as what this sample could teach us about youth. Next, they analyzed the sample for genre hallmarks specific to creative nonfiction and memoir to consider the question of quality of youth memoir.
Findings-The findings suggest that there is no typical adolescence and that youth are balancing complex, intersectional identities, which they write about skillfully through memoir. These findings directly contrast with critics of youth memoir. Rather than clichéd, the memoirs the authors analyzed show youth as intercultural, capable of thoughtful reflection, capturing the transitory state of their youth (knowing they are not children anymore and lightly speculating about their future), skillfully integrating memoir genre hallmarks, and recording important events and perspectives with appeal to a broader readership. Furthermore, these findings position youth memoir as worthy of curricular inclusion alongside adult-generated YAL.
Originality/value-If the critics of youth memoir are the loudest voices, youth memoir will be, at best, relegated as examples for writers rather than seen as valid additions to curricular canon. This work gives due credit to the quality of published youth memoir to showcase their potential for curricular and canonical addition. This study builds on smaller-scale case studies and personal accounts to make an argument for curricular inclusion of youth voices and youth memoir in the secondary canon.
Book Chapters by Jason Griffith
Videos by Jason Griffith
Book Reviews by Jason Griffith
Engaging your students in the reading of a nonfiction narrative with collaborative chapter notes, empathy check-ins, and a mini-research paper to deepen students’ understanding;
Helping your students identify meaningful life events, recount their experiences creatively, and construct effective opening and closing lines for their personal essays;
Encouraging your students to use dialogue, outside research, and a clear plot structure to make their narrative nonfiction more compelling and polished.
The strategies in this book are supplemented by examples of student work and snapshots from the author’s own classroom. The book also includes interviews with narrative nonfiction writers MK Asante and Johanna Bear. The appendices offer additional tips for using narrative nonfiction in English class, text and online resources for teaching narrative nonfiction, and a correlation chart between the activities in this book and the Common Core Standards.
Design/methodology/approach-Informed theoretically by the Youth Lens, which considers how texts reinforce and/or disrupt various figurations of adolescence and youth, this study uses a multistage qualitative analysis of 83 youth memoir published in nine volumes of the Best Teen Writing from 2010 to 2018. First, the authors conducted a Labovian plot analysis to consider what themes and topics were present as well as what this sample could teach us about youth. Next, they analyzed the sample for genre hallmarks specific to creative nonfiction and memoir to consider the question of quality of youth memoir.
Findings-The findings suggest that there is no typical adolescence and that youth are balancing complex, intersectional identities, which they write about skillfully through memoir. These findings directly contrast with critics of youth memoir. Rather than clichéd, the memoirs the authors analyzed show youth as intercultural, capable of thoughtful reflection, capturing the transitory state of their youth (knowing they are not children anymore and lightly speculating about their future), skillfully integrating memoir genre hallmarks, and recording important events and perspectives with appeal to a broader readership. Furthermore, these findings position youth memoir as worthy of curricular inclusion alongside adult-generated YAL.
Originality/value-If the critics of youth memoir are the loudest voices, youth memoir will be, at best, relegated as examples for writers rather than seen as valid additions to curricular canon. This work gives due credit to the quality of published youth memoir to showcase their potential for curricular and canonical addition. This study builds on smaller-scale case studies and personal accounts to make an argument for curricular inclusion of youth voices and youth memoir in the secondary canon.