This article reviews Margaret Meek Spencer's body of work in relation to the various policies that she critiqued from the Bullock Report in 1974 to the National Literacy Strategy in 2004. She analysed increasingly conservative moves to promote a dominant, elitist version of school literacy. A Critical Realist perspective aligns with Margaret Meek…

The current COVID-19 epidemic, which began in China and has nearly infected every nation globally, is one of the most recent public health catastrophes of worldwide significance. The language and literature programs in public and private schools have become more flexible due to the new standard structure that the Philippines adopted due to the…

The four canonical gospels provide readers with few details of the life of Jesus as a boy. Many authors of children's bibles in America, however, have been happy to fill in some of the details. This article suggests that these retellings regularly create or adapt stories of Jesus' childhood to teach children virtues that serve to affirm…

This article provides a close reading of Meg Rosoff's award-winning novel "How I Live Now". It argues that an understanding of the text can be extended through an application of ideas found in contemporary spatial discourse concerning place. Reading the novel within this context allows a discussion of ways in which it draws on…

Viewing Tolstoy's works from psychological and intellectual perspectives demonstrates his approach to children's literacy and especially the development of reasoning, which he presents in his writing for children and the stories he includes in his "New ABC" book (1875a) and four "Readers" (1875b). This article…

This article looks at how four British-based poets born in the Caribbean exploit the rich language repertoire available to them in their work for children and young people. Following initial consideration of questions of definition and terminology, poetry collections by James Berry, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Valerie Bloom are discussed, with a…

Online booksellers have done a terrific job of developing ways to let customers share their opinions about books with the goal of getting a person to buy more books. They have also made effective use of the bottom line, which is what a customer spends those hard-earned dollars on, to further entice people to add one more item to their cart. In…

The 2011 Children's Literature Assembly Workshop investigated cultural contexts and relevant issues in children's literature. Award-winning authors, illustrators, and an educator shared their thoughts about writing, illustrating, and teaching multiethnic literature. The panel included author Nikki Grimes, author and illustrator Eric Velasquez,…

The Common Core generally eschews mandating texts in favor of promoting critical analysis and rigor. So it's significant that Shakespeare is the only author invoked in imperatives. His explicit inclusion offers a significant opportunity for educators to rethink how we approach Shakespearean instruction. Rather than the traditional learning of…

Why do educators teach literature? The author thinks they can hear the answer in the voice of Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield and Holden Caulfield and the omniscient narrator in "Beloved." It's the wonderful sound of those words, the gorgeous flow of those well-crafted sentences, and the marvelous way Twain and Dickens and Morrison and…

Bullying remains a wretched, pervasive problem in the society, especially for teenagers. Bullying is commonly defined as negative acts that occur repeatedly and involve an imbalance of power (Olweus 413); since this widely accepted definition excludes one-time acts of cruelty, the authors prefer to use the word "conflict" in their conversations…

Children's literature remains a primary vehicle for intellectual and imaginative maturation, and it is thus important to ask whether younger students have the opportunity to transact with books that represent and raise questions about shared experiences and cooperation across social, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. The authors examine three…

Literary criticism in the form of the so-called book report, may, therefore, wrote Stephen Bloore in 1934, "be a most valuable aid to independent thought if it is not used merely to check up on the books supposedly read by a student". For a century, "English Journal" has been a map and a narrative of the discourse about teaching ELA as well as the…

In this article, the author focuses on her experiences with genre analysis. This is not a new idea or assignment. But gearing the analysis specifically toward thinking about purpose significantly narrows the focus of a typical "here's what this genre is and who uses it" essay. Genre analysis asks students to think in-depth about one particular…

Literature circles or book clubs are small, heterogeneous groups of students who have chosen to read and discuss the same book together. The research on literature circles suggests that they hold great promise for increasing students' enjoyment of reading and honing their literacy skills. When evidence-based strategies are embedded into a…