Helping students recognize the value of humanistic inquiry can be challenging, especially in required courses. This essay presents a solution: an assignment in which students were asked to pitch one of the required readings to Netflix for adaptation. Through close readings of student responses and an analysis of the "so what" component…

"The Teaching Archive" shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up "the teaching archive"--the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments--of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot,…

In this narrative inquiry, the author dramatises the tensions and discoveries that emerged in a literature course for pre-service and in-service teachers in an English education graduate programme. The students' resistance to the instructor's choice of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" as a central text led to reflection on responsible and…

With the advancement of technology and series of curriculum reform, teachers are challenged to recalibrate their teaching methodology and delivery of instruction. Teachers may adopt ways to improve the quality of instruction everyday. In order to achieve this goal, teachers may opt to use variety of instructional methods and techniques such as…

Recent reforms to Initial Teacher Education in England are a continuation of a decades-long political project, aiming to change the whole social complex around teachers' professional education. But the most recent frameworks present some new inflections to the construction of learning, pedagogical relationships and difference. Positivist versions…

This article examines the deeper purposes behind the teaching of creative writing. To extend an analogy created by William Blake in his poem 'The Tyger', its furnaces are examined and its 'deadly terrors' clasped. It re-interprets the different views of teaching English, as drawn up in the United Kingdom's Cox Report. It argues that these views…

Providing written commentary on essays to students in English has long been a challenge for instructors. With increasing numbers of students being placed in classrooms, it can be difficult to deliver an adequate amount of feedback without taxing too much of teachers' time. Consequently, the author wanted to know what feedback students valued most…

Despite ongoing and prolific critical scholarship arguing for the widening of the secondary language arts curriculum, many practicing teachers are required or encouraged to teach a curriculum dominated by canonical texts. This is often the case at schools with highly diverse students whose varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds have…

This profile describes how the Writing Program at Southern Utah University enacts a rhetorical humanist framework in its administrative and curricular structures. At the administrative level, rhetorical humanism offers a collaborative governance model that gives all faculty a voice in programmatic decisions, while managing the cacophony created by…

This article presents and illustrates a qualitative research methodology for studies of uptake. It does so by articulating a theoretical framework for qualitative investigations of uptake and detailing a research study designed to invoke and capture students' uptakes in a first-year writing classroom. The research design sought to make uptake…

The French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) wrote that "to read good books is like holding a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries and, moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts" (translation of the "Discourse on Method" by F. E. Sutcliffe…

"The Road" has been an important part of the author's English IV Honors course for several years now. Undeniably bleak, it details a father and son's journey through a seared, post-apocalyptic wasteland. As they travel through the burnt remains of America, they are threatened by starvation, dehydration, and scattered, hostile humans. Although his…

Freud asking whether psychoanalysis could be taught in the university, and then whether it could be learned, provides an occasion for asking about the emotional uses of theory. The paper draws from literature, clinical writing and pedagogy to build a psychoanalytic discussion of teaching and learning that takes seriously phantasies of knowledge…

I propose that we think about what a paragraph is by considering its "function," what it does in a piece of writing, whether in a popular novel, a newspaper article, an e-mail, a business report, or a lofty piece of literary criticism. We might think about a paragraph as a "rhetorical dwelling."

Recently, when preparing course materials for English graduate students on the practical skills and theoretical dimensions of teaching literature, the author surveyed the literature on the "state of the field" of literary studies in English (and the entire concept of a liberal arts education), ranging from high-profile monographs to various…