This article is concerned with teachers' engagement with educational research. It presents a subset of data from a larger study, which explored teachers' responses to educational research published in a peer-reviewed journal. In this article, I discuss four ways of reading that the participants employed while addressing the validity and usability…

"Not reading," even for many good students, has become a mode of operation with respect to book-length texts assigned in school. Many students enter secondary and postsecondary literature classes "intending" to "not read" the books teachers assign. More students than teachers want to admit do not complete assigned reading, choosing instead to…

As a teacher with more than 30 years experience at the middle school, secondary, and college level, primarily in English studies, Patterson (the first author) decided a few years ago to reexamine his practices and instructional methods. He wondered what would be the effects on him and his students when he would begin to utilize ideas emanating…

Ken Donelson looks back on two classes that taught him that students are willing to share ideas when teachers are honest and reveal their biases and when classroom experiences are based on trust. Additionally, he recalls how important free reading and thematic units became to inciting authentic student responses to literature.

Discusses three ways to improve and strengthen a school newspaper's image through effective public relations designed to (1) encourage readers to react; (2) solicit comments from parents, news sources, community leaders, and politicians; and (3) encourage the school board to respond. (RS)

Describes an approach to teaching George Orwell's "1984," emphasizing the main characters' struggles through the themes of innocence and experience, conformity and rebellion, love and hate, discovery and creation, and death. Notes that this reader-response approach forces students into the process of self-examination. (MM)

Describes how a high school student was able to express powerful feelings and achieve some kind of reconciliation with his father through his therapeutic exploration of Arthur Miller's play "Death of a Salesman." (PRA)

Shows how one teacher answered student questions about how a particular piece of literature came to be regarded as worthy of in-depth examination. Proposes that students be taught about various critical approaches, including Jungian/archetypal criticism, formalism, reader-response criticism, socio-historical and biographical criticism, and…

Relates one experience of teaching poetry in a rural high school in Jamaica. Recounts the teacher's reflections on her observations of the teaching of the same poem (Michael Smith's "Mi C-YaaN beLieVe iT" written in Jamaican Creole) taught in a poetry class in rural Jamaica and a British classroom. (RS)

Asks the reader to try to make sense out of one student's response to Adrien Stoutenberg's poem "Reel One." Presents the student's reading and an analysis of the student's reading. (HB)

Argues for the consideration of food and gastronomy in the teaching of English in high schools. Provides methods of teaching writing in conjunction with student response to eating. (HB)

Describes a study that showed how and what two classes of middle-track 10th graders wrote and learned when their teacher employed reader-based and teacher-centered instructional tasks for discussing and writing about a short story. Finds that reader-based tasks for reading and writing may enable teachers to rethink literature instruction in…

Discusses 10 reasons to end the senior year of high school with Bernard Malamud's novel "The Natural." (RS)

Defines components of activity systems shaping readers' responses to literature. Applies a framework to responses of "advanced" and "regular" high school students to a story about a regular student going on a field trip with advanced students. Applies the framework to responses of teachers in a graduate writing methods course…

Shares personal and profound experiences that permitted the emergence of a method of response to literature, circles of meaning, including excerpts of a master's thesis case study of a student making meaning of short stories using the method. Notes some of the learnings that this experience brought into the author's work with education students.…