While Sada Harbarger is primarily known as the author of the first genre-based technical communication textbook, 1923's "English For Engineers," I argue through extensive archival materials that her innovative conferencing with engineering students and interdisciplinary writing efforts, rather, drove her interwar success at Ohio State.…

In the era of remote learning courses, the humanities instructor struggled more than most to translate the many familiar techniques of close reading to the unfamiliar realm of technology. Oftentimes instructors have depended on facsimiles of traditional methods: a shared passage annotated by the class digitally, or small groups sent to individual…

This essay considers what happens in the English classroom when teaching the same lesson to two classes considered to be of different levels of 'ability'. It explores what happens during a discussion about the fate of Eva Smith in "An Inspector Calls" when students' reading of a text diverges. I consider what teachers do when students'…

This book documents an informal system of education that emerged in Ireland between the late 1750s and the end of the century, a system that operated largely without funding or direction by church or state. In a society as divided as eighteenth-century Ireland, it is remarkable that such a system could succeed, paving the way for the more formal…

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…

For the last several years, teacher-researchers Jessica Jasper, Laura Dvorak, Steven Athanases, and Sergio Sanchez have partnered with a program called Globe Education, Shakespeare's Globe London. Practitioners in the program use teaching practices that engage learners with Shakespeare's works and other complex texts through drama practices. Jess…

This article addresses key theoretical and practical concerns related to the intercultural encounter with multimodal literature. Previous efforts to incorporate an intercultural dimension into conceptualisations of literary literacy have primarily focused on competences associated with the reading of traditional, script-based texts. However, as…

The nature of English as a school subject -- and particularly English literature -- is a longstanding issue of debate for practitioners and researchers internationally. One dimension of this concerns the forces that shape the diet of literary texts that students are fed. In this study, we draw on the ecological model of agency to interrogate the…

In this paper, I reflect on a series of lectures, underpinned by the principles of critical pedagogy, when engaging with Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Working with student teachers in a South African School of Education, I used a talk-back design to enable students to talk back to the canon and open the dialogue about resistance. I used…

Most students meet Shakespeare in middle or high school, on a page in a book in an English classroom. This first encounter is a disservice to the students themselves and to Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays are works of both literature and theatre, and should be taught as such. A performance-based teaching approach not only provides high school…

Across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects on many aspects of our everyday lives. Changes have also been apparent in the field of teaching since most teaching now has to be carried out online. Despite its drawbacks, this forced change to online instruction and learning has helped me reflect on my teaching. Based on my…

The benefits of performance-based classroom approaches to teaching Shakespeare have been well-documented in pedagogical scholarship. This paper is an effort to push beyond the performance-based classroom and begin to incorporate ideas from the field of performance studies into a new pedagogical approach that capitalizes on my institution's…

Over the past decade, local live productions of Shakespeare have become increasingly visible to scholars and audiences alike, both through critical work on the subject as well as through public projects such as Shakespeare on the Road. This visibility highlights the cultural and artistic work of regional theatre. On the one hand, local live…

English literature has faced homosexuality in a progressive manner though it has been through a struggling history. That is why a lot of writers of English literature have expressed and enjoyed themselves in their own ways. This paper addresses a few famous writers whose approaches in this regard have been homosexual in type. After looking at the…

The author shares his experience in effecting change in an AP English Literature and Composition course by employing book trailers as an assessment. Using multimodal responses fostered a shared classroom space that combined the students' preferred, everyday communicative modes with the canonical literature study required by the curriculum. This…