This study investigates the interpretive approaches of three English teachers working in different grade levels with the same poem, Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer." The researcher sought to learn what the teachers identified as most valuable about studying poetry in school, what interpretive approaches they employed…

This essay explores an English lesson I taught to a Year 9 class in which students drew upon and narrativised personal experiences. I describe and examine the literary sociability of the lesson, by which I mean the social and cultural exchanges that give shape to students' reading and writing. In doing so, I demonstrate the need for policymakers…

A 9th grade Honors English class creates and publishes original poems, art, fiction, and nonfiction products through an activity called "Type Three -- Twenty Time = T4." The instructional method merges elements from Renzulli's Type III process with elements from Brookhouser's 20Time Project-based learning model. Each student researches…

This paper considers how literacy and education more broadly reflect and reproduce world views and communicative practices rooted in the western epistemological conceptualization of what Sylvia Wynter calls "Man". I frictionally think-with Wynter's hybridity of bios and logos (mythoi), and more-than-human theories in relation to an…

We discuss the design, creation and implementation of an instructional game for use in a high school poetry class following a commitment to an educational game design principle of "alignment". We studied groups of instructional designers and an interactive fiction computer game they built. The game was implemented in a 9th grade English classroom…

This article argues that theoretical understandings of multimodality have enormous potential for assessment purposes in secondary school contexts. Informed by the work of three researchers in three North American high schools, the article offers vignettes of the effective assessment of communicative competence in English classrooms that draws on…

"Teacher to Teacher" provides a forum for teachers to share ideas, materials, and activities. In this article, the first teacher describes the effects the well-known novel "Bleachers" (John Grisham, New York: Doubleday, 2003) had on a ninth-grade english class. The novel bought to life the high school culture that the students found challenging.…

Student teaching in New York City on September 11, 2001, forced the author to scrap her carefully planned lessons. Instead, she designed a unit to address the urgent needs of the ninth graders in her care. In this article, the author describes the poetry unit she designed to help students deal with the grieving process and allow them a way to talk…