In this article, the authors share an account of an eighth-grade personal narrative unit designed to support students in composing accounts of life during the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The article provides an overview of the four phases that comprised this nine-lesson unit and the materials and resources used. Students' voices, perspectives,…

Any activity that involves making choices entails the risk of failure, and the more personally meaningful the choices are, the more deeply felt the failure will be. Drawing on my experiences in supervising the self-chosen, long-term projects of my eighth-grade students, I argue that it is neither possible nor desirable to prevent young people from…

Stories of children moving in and out of refugee camps are not uncommon yet are often overshadowed by the dominant narratives of oppression, political failure, and war -- the stories "told of" rather than "told by" refugees. Dominant narratives on refugees largely shape perceptions about children and youth in displacement as…

Alex Benger asks whether the mode of enquiry adopted by cultural historians, the construction of webs of past meaning from past perspectives, is underexplored in school history. Benger used a cultural history approach in his building of an enquiry for Year 9 around one man's experience of the First World War. Here he examines his pupils' efforts…

Reflecting on challenges that had surfaced in their own and others' efforts to get pupils to write historical narratives, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie went back to the drawing board to consider the disciplinary purposes of narrative. They used both historical scholarship and theoretical works by historians on narrative construction. Their…

This autoethnographic narrative explores the challenges and successes of employing critical pedagogy in an eighth-grade history classroom. Using the threads of teacher, scholar, and individual, the author shares the intellectual and emotional progression through hope, frustration, humility, and growth that this endeavor demanded. Further, this…

This study was conducted for the researcher's Master's thesis on the lived experience of introverted adolescent female students in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. The aim of the research was to better understand these students' lived experiences in public school. Due to their introverted natures, these students' stories are not typically reported. The…

In this study, we investigated the effects of choice of writing prompt on the number of story elements included in written narratives. The investigation took place in a residential facility for students with emotional and behavioral disorders. Participants included six female students in a mixed-grade-level course (students had just completed…

Narrative inquiry has a long tradition in qualitative educational research, although it remains a relatively untapped method of investigation in English curriculum and pedagogy studies. This paper presents one experimental narrative approach through the use of song lyrics as a musical method for storying interview data. Working with non-linear and…

Teenage pregnancy among school-going youth is a concern worldwide, but in socially-economically challenged environments it is a result of, and contributory factor to, a complex web of social injustice. In South Africa, most of the school-based prevention interventions to date have been adult-designed and imparted, with the voice of the target…

Background/Context: Positive teacher-student relationships are critical for Black boys' learning across single-sex and coeducational environments. Limited attention to these relationships by school professionals is rooted in deficit-oriented conceptions of boyhood and Black masculinity. The popular message of deficiency and pathology is clear:…

This qualitative study examines the perceptions that Latino students have of middle school social studies. Twelve Latino/a middle school students provided written narratives recounting their experiences in social studies and participated in two semi-structured phenomenological interviews. Findings indicate that social studies teachers rely heavily…

This paper reports from a case study of a "talent class", a special development programme for talented pupils, established in a Danish municipality. It analyses student backgrounds and motives for joining this talent class programme, which is seen in relation to ordinary schooling in Denmark. Drawing on Bourdieu, the paper links social…

Students with learning disabilities may experience difficulty engaging in literacy activities, as they risk being hindered by negative attitudes and doubt of their intellectual abilities, reduced effort, lower self-efficacy, and failure (Klassen, 2007; Litcht & Kirstner, 1986; Oldfather, 2002; Roberts, Torgesen, Boardman, & Scammacca,…

As professors of education in an urban community, we wanted to identify mechanisms that would allow young people in the urban core the opportunity to share their unique voices with the world and for us to better understand their views on social justice and social change. The purpose of this paper is to discuss adolescent student perspectives on…