"Shakespeare Fixes: Equitable Approaches to Shakespeare Pedagogy in U.S. High Schools" examines the world of Shakespeare professional development and pedagogy for high school teachers. Shakespeare's works occupy a unique place in U.S. schooling, where, due to both the entrenched status of his works in U.S. curricula and the challenging…

Research has called for nuanced scholarly investigations that synergise, complicate, and advance social theories of literacy. Accordingly, this study melds critical literacy, critical race theory, and multiliteracies to distil students' involvement with the canonical "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," investigating: What are…

Purpose: Research on nonschool settings suggests young people benefit from digital multimodal composition. Less is known about how digital composing can support students as they interpret required literary class texts. To understand the potential benefits and challenges of digitally composing for literary analysis, design interviews with two high…

Teacher-researcher, Katherine Macro spent six weeks observing an eleventh-grade Advanced Placement and Composition class at Sunnybrooke Central High School to examine the teacher's use of creative drama to teach Shakespeare. In this article, Macro describes ways the instructor used theater-based instructional strategies, especially a staged…

In this article, the authors use the O. Henry story Transients in Arcadia to illustrate how readers can make a text more meaningful by connecting it to themselves, to other texts, and to the world. Transients in Arcadia is a celebrated ironic commentary about the desire of everyday men and women to experience wealth. The authors have leveraged…

Student enjoyment is important when creating any unit, but teachers should also consider if an activity will enhance learning. In addition to being enjoyable, drama-based activities enrich learning by disrupting passivity, encouraging participation, and enhancing comprehension. This article showcases ways to include these activities in a unit…

This paper investigates the language demands of creating texts in the English classroom, which involve transformations in context. In particular, it focuses on the tensions inherent in tasks which require more traditional textual analysis to be presented in ways other than traditional 'essay' format. These tasks are interpreted differently by…

This case study, which investigates twenty-four 11th-grade students of American literature, asks: What successes and challenges did students experience when reading "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" through a critical race theory (CRT)/critical Whiteness studies (CWS) lens? Findings reveal that applying a CRT/CWS lens helped students…

This short story illustrates an occasion of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogical practices in relation to the canonical texts which are often used in urban classrooms. In it, a lesson on Jane Eyre's childhood point of view and mode of introspectiveness delves into a tale of dancing and Otherness. The story shows that in spaces where…

Henrik Ibsen's play "Peer Gynt" digs deep into the question of what it means to be oneself. An upcoming computer game version invites players to take on the role of Peer and thereby raises new questions about identity and identification. By recording dyads of students who play an early version of the game and analysing their interaction…

Every year since 2007, the Globe Theatre has run the "Playing Shakespeare" project, largely funded by Deutsche Bank. This has three main components: school-based workshops, CPD sessions for teachers and free performances for school students. From 2014 to 2016, we were commissioned to evaluate this project. In what follows, we reflect on…

Purpose: This paper focuses on the affordances of and issues surrounding the teaching of George Orwell's novel "1984" (1949) as a set text for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) English and English Literature in an examination-obsessed and heavily surveilled school system. It considers this by focussing on the classroom…

This conceptual article explores early adolescent students' responses to an experimental Gothic reading unit (including popular culture and traditional texts). The Gothic genre was selected due to both its prevalence in youth culture and lack of representation in reading classrooms. This hybrid curriculum increased academic reading engagement in…

This paper reports on findings from the author's Masters of Education project in which Classics as an after-school curriculum enhancement programme was offered to Year 9 pupils (aged 13-14) in a maintained school in Salford. The programme also incorporated excursions to supplement the extracurricular lessons delivered by the researcher (a…

The author pushes two desks together in the front of the class and pile supplies on them: markers, drawing paper, rulers, and pencils. As the students enter a combined English language arts (ELA) and English as a New Language (ENL) tenth-grade classroom, they select what they need and settle in to their work. As an ELA educator who is also a…