The protection and regulation of religious expression present complex challenges. Blasphemy laws, which criminalize acts deemed disrespectful to religious beliefs, have been abolished in England, allowing for broader freedom of expression. However, concerns and discussions about blasphemy persist. The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman (2023), has…

In this paper, we draw upon Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading to frame six readings of a picture book. The picture book, "There's a Ghost in This House" by Oliver Jeffers, was selected for a children's literature reading group which brought together literacy researchers and teacher educators to share their encounters with the…

This paper explores the importance of students responding to children's books for diversity and disabilities. The main claim of the paper is that we need to explore new ways of engaging children to respond to diversity beyond the traditional model of Reader's Response Theory. Even though Reader's Response Theory is a very important framework to…

This paper examines literacy as a sociocultural, personal and human practice dependent on and derived through relationships between people, settings and culture. Drawing on a recent empirical research study that combines learner, teacher and author perspectives [Curtin (2023) "Reading and Writing Pathways Through Children's and Young Adult…

Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text…

This article describes an instructional strategy developed to integrate reading and writing. This strategy invites students to use reading, writing poetry, and illustrating as tools to represent intertextual connections to self-selected paired text. It identifies poetic inquiry as the research methodology, discusses intertextuality, and provides a…

This article explores the potential of narrative interest for secondary literature education. Narrative is a purposeful construction which is organised with the intent of having effects on readers. For rhetorical narratologists, narrative is driven by the production of narrative gaps -- suspense, curiosity, and surprise -- which in turn drive…

This article draws on Philip Barnard's model of the interactions between theory and practice, between basic and applied research, to investigate the paradox of reading as an experience both private and public. It uses internal reader experience as a starting point for exploration, evoking the concept of a readerly sense of presence as a selection…

What can the affective turn mean for literacy educators who believe their work can lay the foundation for a life filled with meaningful reading pursuits, for students who "become" readers and "do" reading? Because reading occurs across and within an elaborate composite of time, space, relationships, histories, discourses, and…

This article reflects on insights gained from a larger study that explored how a class of ten- and eleven-year-olds read and responded to David Almond's hybrid novel, "My Name is Mina." Through focusing on the children's performances of the poems contained within the text, the discussion examines embodied aspects of the children's…

This article argues that emotions are utilized for norm breaking, identity formation, and socialization in S.E. Hinton's YA novel "The Outsiders" (1967). Drawing on the history of emotions studies, it investigates how emotional expressions are utilized to negotiate and contest given emotional norms on the one hand, and Young Adult…

I discuss a published paper in political science that made a claim that aroused skepticism. The reanalysis is an example of how we, as consumers as well as producers of science, can engage with published work. This can be viewed as a sort of collaboration performed implicitly between the authors of a published paper and later researchers who want…

The article discusses the image of the family and the family home in a series of novels for young people by the popular Polish writer Malgorzata Musierowicz in the context of literary conventions and stereotypes about the family in contemporary Polish society. The novels, which cover a period of over 40 years, generally fit contemporary Polish…

In this essay, authors Todd Reynolds, Leslie S. Rush, Jodi P. Lampi, and Jodi Patrick Holschuh provide a disciplinary heuristic that bridges literary and literacy theories. The secondary English language arts (ELA) classroom is situated at the intersection between literary theory and literacy theory, where too often literary theory does not…

This essay uses the metaphor of "savvy travelling" to discuss the limitations and problems associated with three current "best practice" approaches to the reading of literature in upper grade levels, particularly in the United States: close reading, response-based reading, and disciplinary literacy. A "savvy" approach…