While more students than ever are completing high school with a diploma, the American education system has a long way to go until each and every student is prepared for what comes after graduation. Unless significant advancements are made in closing existing gaps in educational attainment, America's current employment gaps will worsen as the…

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…

English departments are roundly praised for their emphasis on skills rather than content. In the authors' classes, students read (skill), write (skill), think (skill), speak (skill), and listen (skill). Theoretically, the books being taught are interchangeable and simply a means to skill acquisition. But that's not always what happens in the…

In this article, the author wonders when the use of the term "trenches"--which carries with it negative connotations--became a euphemism for teaching first year students, and considers how tenured or full-time faculty teaching first-year courses could be a simple solution to student retention by providing institutional support for…

Today, "Night" is probably the most commonly taught work of Holocaust literature in the United States, read by middle school and high school students alike, even though US adolescents were not the author's intended audience. This article offers suggestions for teaching "Night" in ways that engage students, challenge them to…

Currently, more than 50 of the top 100 YouTube channels feature gameplay, a popularity largely fueled by young audiences. Let's Play videos (often known simply as LPs) typically include gameplay footage accompanied by simultaneous commentary recorded by the player. This article explores three ways English educators might use Let's Play videos and…

This paper gives a brief summary of Halliday's theory of how children learn to talk, illustrating the development of children's language from the microfunctions through the macrofunctions and into the metafunctions of adult language. The paper points to a possible source of the misinterpretation of Halliday's theory in the work of Frank Smith…

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…

In this article, the author describes three strategies they have used to bolster interest and make use of popular culture to enhance readers' interactions with texts: pop culture pairings, musical connections, and multimodal projects. The author addresses the cultivation of pop culture awareness, the importance of multimodal pedagogy, the…

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…

This essay questions the place that conversations about 'race' hold in the English classroom. I hope to reveal the problems that may come with easily dismissing tense and racially charged dialogues about language and identity. I also explore the way classroom talk opens up an opportunity for students to create and contest different meanings and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reflect on pedagogical strategies which support the teaching of critical analysis of visual and multimodal texts in a tertiary-level course for Arts students. Design/methodology/approach: The paper describes strategies which focus on developing students' abilities to express interpretive critique, as…

Throughout a unit of study about survival, students and their teacher engaged in individualized learning. Discussions of teacher-dictated curriculum versus student-driven learning, design of the unit, and students' and teacher's experiences and takeaways from the unit are included.

When Ana, a student in Miss Jerome's American Literature course, watched a makeup tutorial instead of completing her assigned work, it became a critical incident highlighting how one educator used student counterscripts to critically center students' ways of knowing and ways of being in the English curriculum. Using culturally sustaining…