Christian Educators Journal April 2026 Vol. 65 No. 4 ISSN: 3070-2348
Resource Review
Reel Teachers: Teacher Films as a Resource for Real Teachers Reading, Rebooted Off the Record: Four Favorite Middle Read Books According to Kids Teaching Early Literacy with Wherever I Go: Psalm 139 for Kids Nine Picture Books that Should Have Won Awards From Recitation to Relationship Attend to God’s Will in Your Classroom
Contents
3 Editorial 4 Reel Teachers: Teacher Films as a Resource for Real Teachers KEN BADLEY
8 Reading, Rebooted: Getting Students Back into Books
CASEY JORRISTMA AND RENAE HURTMAN
11 Off the Record: Four Favorite Middle Read Books According to Kids KRISTIN VANEYK
15 Teaching Early Literacy with Wherever I Go: Psalm 139 for Kids
BECKY CERLING POWERS
20 Nine Picture Books that Should Have Won Awards LOIS BOERMAN
23 From Recitation to Relationship: Teaching the Land Acknowledgement in Primary Grades CHARMAIN BROWN
30 How to Attend to God’s Will in Your Classroom:
A Review of Biblical Integration Models for Education LUCIANO CID
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Christian Educators Journal Vol. 65 No. 4, April 2026 ISSN: 3070-2348 cejonline.com Editor Abby Zwart cejeditor@gmail.com The Christian Educators Journal (CEJ) encourages letters to the editor in response to articles presented in the CEJ. Letters must be accompanied by the author’s name and email address. The CEJ reserves the right to edit letters for length and clarity. Where a letter addresses issues raised by the author of an article, the CEJ reserves the right to invite the article author to respond to the letter. Subscriptions Klaas Wolterstorff Business Manager Christian Educators Journal 2474 Westboro Dr NE Grand Rapids, MI 49506 business@cejonline.com Subscription Price (US dollars) Digital only: $25.00 per year Beginning October 2025, all subscriptions are digital only. Please visit www.cejonline for subscription information. Indexed in Christian Periodicals Index Copyrighted 2000 CEJ. All rights reserved. Christian Educators Journal (130630) is published quarterly by Christian Educators Journal Association. Scripture All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Statement of Purpose The Christian Educators Journal Association publishes the Journal as a channel of communication for all educators committed to the idea of Christian day school at the elementary, secondary, and college levels. The views expressed are those of the writers and not necessarily those of the association. Reprint Policy We allow free reprinting or photocopying of individual articles that have appeared in our journal, as long as the copied articles are used within the context of schooling and the source is acknowledged. Editor Abby Zwart Copyeditor Bethany Murphy Design Editor Klaas Wolterstorff Business Manager Klaas Wolterstorff Web Shepherd Heather Altena Board of Trustees Dr. Henry Algera Heather Birch Eunsub Cho Justin Cook (Chair) Albert Kok Dave Loewen Gayle Monsma Sean Schat Christine Scholma (Secretary) Tricia Stobbe Heather VanDyke Supporting Institutions Calvin University The King’s University Redeemer University Trinity Christian College Tyndale University Subscribing Organizations Christian Educators Association Christian Educators of British Columbia Edvance Christian Schools Association Prairie Centre for Christian Education Printed back issues (if available) can be purchased for $7.50 per copy (cost of shipping to be added to total). Some back issues may be available in digital format.
Editorial
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pring break is just around the corner as I write this, and I’ve been collecting books to take on my trip to the beach. I’m going to start with my book club’s book of the month, A Marriage at Sea. I’ve already cracked that one open and read the first chapter, where a boat the couple has been building sinks to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. I’m hooked, even though it’s nonfiction—not my preferred genre. Next up, I think I’ll try another nonfiction title that caught my eye on a “best of 2025 list” a few months back. Journalist Chris Deville of Stereogum wrote Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, and I think it’s going to melt my millennial heart. After those *cough* very academic nonfiction titles, I’ve got a fluffy Carley Fortune novel packed, and it’s been ages since I read one of my favorites, Cold Mountain, so that’s in the bag to round things out. With summer on the way, hopefully you’re starting your “to read” list. In this annual resource review issue, you’ll find lots of titles that will delight your students from elementary all the way through high school. Plus, Charmain Brown offers suggestions for integrating land acknowledgements into your current curriculum, Luciano Cid reviews a new textbook, and Ken Badley starts off the issue with a commentary on some of our favorite (or not-so-favorite) teachers on screen. This will be my last issue as editor of CEJ. I will miss choosing the themes for each issue (the 2026–2027 themes are out; check page 34!); working with my great copyeditor, business manager, and web shepherd; corresponding with authors; and conferring with the CEJ board on the direction of the journal. It certainly won’t be my last issue as a reader, though, and I look forward to reading many of your great reflections and ideas in the future. That means we are on the hunt for a new editor! More details and a formal job description will be released soon. In the meantime, please email chair@cejonline.com for more information if you’re interested. Happy reading!
—Abby Zwart
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Reel Teachers: Teacher Films as a Resource for Real Teachers KEN BADLEY
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n what ways can reel teachers—teachers in movies and television shows— serve as a resource for the real teachers like us who show up in our classrooms day after day for the hard work of teaching? The short answer to that question is that reel teachers can teach real teachers quite a bit. Teacher films reveal a lot about how teachers’ worldviews shape their views of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and relationships with students. Teacher films offer warnings about the importance of recognizing professional boundaries. And, sometimes to our disadvantage, they shape and may distort students’, the public’s, and even our own perceptions of what effective teachers look and act like.
Teachers’ Worldviews For both better and worse, teacher films reveal how teachers’ worldviews shape how they frame the key component parts of teaching work. To refer to what is one of the best-known teacher films, Dead Poets Society (P. Weir, dir., 1989), think about some of the actions taken by Robin Williams’s character, Mr. Keating. He has his students tear some pages out of their textbook, making clear his own view that the curriculum is something other than what is prescribed in official documents and expressed in course textbooks. In challenging them to answer the question “What will your poem be?” he expresses a view of instruction where students’ ideas are foregrounded and the curriculum materials themselves are merely jumping-off points for existential wandering. The first scenes of Mona Lisa Smile (J. Newell, dir., 2003) show a college art professor making a similar move by asking her students the blunt question “What is art?” In the introductory minutes on the first day of class, she makes the curriculum problematic. Other teacher films show teachers doing the opposite. In effect, such teachers make clear that the curriculum is set and only those students who follow it will succeed. For example, Pressure Cooker (M. Becker, dir., 2008) is a documentary film made in the culinary arts classroom of Wilma Stephenson, the no-nonsense Philadelphia high school teacher known because her graduates regularly won hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to cooking schools. Like the worldviews of the characters in Dead Poets Society and Mona Lisa Smile, Wilma Stephenson’s worldview becomes clear to viewers of Pressure Cooker.
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Professional Boundaries Some reel teachers adhere carefully to what most teaching professionals consider appropriate boundaries. Others do not. We typically think of two such boundaries: in relationships between teachers and students, and in the balance of the teacher’s work and personal life. Many reel teachers fail at boundary maintenance. In Half Nelson (R. Fleck, dir., 2006), for example, Ryan Gosling plays Dan Dunne, a high school teacher whose drug habits become known to students. Boundary violations involving romantic relationships between teachers and students are almost a cliché; that category contains too many films to list. Fewer films attend to appropriate boundaries between teaching work and one’s personal life. Two such films come to mind, both based on the lives of real teachers. Recall from Freedom Writers (R. LaGravenese, dir., 2007) the lengths to which Erin Gruwell went to help her students, even taking on extra employment so she could purchase more classroom materials. In Stand and Deliver (R. Menéndez, dir., 1988) based on Jay Matthews’ 1986 book Escalante: Best Teacher in America, we see a teacher whose deep commitment to his students’ success leads him to make bigger personal sacrifices than most of us would comfortably make.
Shaping Images of Teaching and Teachers Overall, teacher films have a mixed effect on students’ and teachers’ images of teachers and teaching. Naturally, Hollywood teacher films with major stars may leave viewers thinking that all teachers should be very attractive, or funny, or mysterious and charismatic, or rebellious, like Dewey Finn, Jack Black’s imposter character in School of Rock (R. Linklater, dir., 2003). One film may even send the false message that knowing karate is helpful for teachers of English (Dangerous Minds, J. Smith, dir., 1995). Viewers may infer from films such as the first two I mentioned in this article, Mona Lisa Smile and Dead Poets Society, that truly dedicated teachers lose their jobs after one year because some kind of educational establishment harbors a deep antipathy to creativity and honesty. Some films offer a more accurate portrayal of real teachers and teaching. For example, the French film To Be and to Have (Être et avoir, N. Philibert, dir., 2002) documents life in a village classroom for an entire academic year. Teachers consistently find this film encouraging because it portrays the real success and challenges faced by George Lopez, the real teacher in that multigrade classroom. Chalk (M. Akel, dir., 2006), an American film that presents a similarly realistic picture of teaching, follows three teachers as they navigate their first year of teaching. Chalk was written and framed as a feature film, but all its actors are actual teachers, allowing teacher viewers to feel something like, “These people get it!”
Real Teachers Using Reel Teachers Actual teachers—real teachers—can use reel teachers in several ways, two of which I will treat here. First, teachers can use clips from teacher films as Christian Educators Journal
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