Selecting diverse texts is vital for creating culturally inclusive and responsive literacy classrooms. However, despite growing student diversity and a push for multicultural literature curricular adoption, little impact has been made on secondary teacher multicultural text selection. This text selection stagnation begs further examination amidst…

This paper presents an analysis of the prescribed text list for senior school English (including English as an Additional Language or Dialect, EAL/D) in Queensland, Australia. Queer understandings about the normalization of cisgender and heterosexuality provide a framework to analyze prescribed texts for adolescent learners. Hetero-cisgender norms…

The introduction of the Literature strand within the Australian Curriculum requires all teachers to engage students in print and digital literature that embrace the cross-curriculum priorities and support students to examine, evaluate, and discuss literary texts. However, such curriculum change assumes that primary school teachers who have often…

Australia has recently moved from having curricula developed within individual states to national curricula, including in English. This move in Australia has coincided with debate over Michael Young's call for 'bringing knowledge back in'. English has historically been epistemologically unstable with an ever-contestable knowledge base, and this is…

This article offers insights on how students experienced and made sense of their learning in a trimester-long high school Gay and Lesbian Literature course. Drawing on questionnaires and interviews that the students completed as part of a larger ethnographic study of this class, the author shows how a queer-themed literature curriculum is relevant…

Reports on a survey that asked 500 students what the word "literature" meant to them. Concludes that the variety of answers indicate that English teachers need to be clearer about what they believe literature is and that only then can they clarify the objectives of a literary education. (JAD)

Summarizes responses to a questionnaire on popular literature courses that was sent to English department chairpersons. (GT)

An attitude questionnaire completed by 60 British teachers of English and a media education survey completed by 20 of them indicated they do not agree that the national curriculum should be revised by returning to narrow prescriptions and dropping media education. Teachers support a broad-based approach including personal response and critical…

Offers examples of ways that college and university departments of English can broaden students' capabilities as readers and critics. (AEA)

The purpose of this paper is to develop a rationale and an outline of a curriculum for a secondary school literature course which satisfies the societal need to understand national moral development and the literature which expresses that moral development. "National" is defined as those groups of persons who use the English language to express…

Analyzes literature curricula and the canon represented in literature anthologies. Discusses the embedded power structure, the role of genre, women fiction writers, the role of "people of color" in the textbook canon, and the absence of dissenting voices. Concludes that the textbook canon does not affirm differences of opinion and of…

Summarizes a study involving three high school English teachers' efforts to integrate multicultural literature into the curriculum. The analysis, highlighting teachers' concerns and decisional influences, argues that teachers must not only select multicultural texts, but they must change their notions of what counts as a text and how they…

Presents data from a survey of the course offerings of 265 midwestern high schools that tend to support the belief that language arts minicourse programs still exist in spite of a trend toward a more traditional curriculum. Listed first in the data is the finding that every high school offered at least one minicourse in composition. (AEA)

Reviews a study of community college English programs examining levels of faculty education, academic rank, teaching experience, scholarly activities, curricula, teaching practices in developmental and college-level writing courses, institutional environment, and classification data. Indicates that faculty spend most of their careers teaching…

Describes a program that teaches reading and thinking strategies through a student-centered, literature-based curriculum designed to increase students' cognitive strategy use, reading achievement, self-esteem, and critical-thinking abilities. An experiment demonstrated that 178 elementary school students in the program outperformed 174 control…