The power of the coloniser within colonial Australia is clear when we consider how central to the teaching and learning and schooling in Australia is the privileging of Standard Australian English. Prior to 1788, the peoples and the lands of this country were abound with languages. That was until the coloniser exerted their power and insisted on a…

Over a three-year collaborative partnership involving university researchers, government curriculum specialists, and school division teams and educators, this post-qualitative study has engaged a diffractive methodology to research pedagogical change in relationship to a renewed provincial curriculum framework in English Language Arts (ELA). In…

In this article, the authors describe how integrating music with reading and writing practices stimulated transmediation to (1) honor musical students' identities, (2) deepen readers' meaning making with literature, and (3) invite writers' memories to generate emotional grist for composing poetry. The authors share examples to inspire teachers to…

This essay poses the question of the role that literary knowledge plays in subject English. It thus engages with current debates, largely prompted by Michael Young's call to 'bring knowledge back in', about the need to restore academic knowledge as the basis of the school curriculum. We take issue with Young's understanding of knowledge, arguing…

At the heart of "Rethinking the 'Adolescent' in Adolescent Literacy" is a call to English language arts teachers to examine the very assumptions of adolescence they may be operating from in order to reimagine new possibilities for engaging students with the English curriculum. Relying on a sociocultural view of adolescence established by…

The nonfiction letter offers students an opportunity to study a dying art while also gaining insights about people, places, and eras. Teaching students the value of letters teaches community, caring, and connection. Whereas reading great works of literature can and does provide insight into life's purpose and meaning, the nonfiction text of a…

The national curriculum for English is about to be rewritten again, having only been looked at four years ago. According to the chair of the expert group on the new national curriculum this is because the curricula of the past had become too baggy. Although he was not specifically looking at the English curriculum this too is being examined. This…

The second part of this account of struggles over literacy begins in the later seventeenth century. From the 1670s, the new dissenting academies, backed by rising business classes, made teaching in English for a wider curriculum their goal. Thus was Defoe's mastery of a new spoken style developed, while in Scotland, the eighteenth century…

Contrary to what has usually been asserted, the "New English" that became a near-orthodoxy in the later 1960s and '70s had its essential origins in the apparently less promising setting of the later 1950s. Current research into English teaching in three postwar London secondary schools is revealing that in at least one working-class…

English language instruction in New Zealand's Maori-medium schools is controversial, with many schools either excluding it from their curriculum or adopting a tokenistic approach. Yet, how Maori-medium educators can best support their students' academic English language growth is still an under-researched and unresolved question. This paper…

The paper takes as its starting point the relationship between the "New English", a curriculum movement commonly associated with the 1960s and 1970s, and the New Education, an influential general educational reform movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It inquires into the…

This paper is divided into two sections related to an experimental program in English for black Americans. The first section is a report describing the program. In 1969, approximately 150 black students from urban ghettos in the North and rural communities in the South were admitted to the University of Wisconsin under a special scholarship…

Describes collaborative study done by a prekindergarten teacher, staff developer, and college teacher educator utilizing a highly integrated curriculum whose core was multiple symbol systems. Notes focus on literacy as well as beginnings of writing and reading. Concludes that within the context of high-stakes schooling, the teacher managed to…