Author Toni Morrison used fictional narratives to make readers uncomfortably aware of their collective role in perpetuating the culture of poverty and pitying its victims. In her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," she focused on the most vulnerable member of society -- a child -- to depict the consequences of extreme social isolation and…

Purpose: In an era when engagement in public spaces and places is increasingly regulated and constrained, we argue for the use of literary analytic tools to enable younger generations to critically examine and reenvision everyday spatialities (Rogers, 2016; Rogers et al., 2015). The purpose of this paper is to consider how spatial analyses of…

This article examines the deeper purposes behind the teaching of creative writing. To extend an analogy created by William Blake in his poem 'The Tyger', its furnaces are examined and its 'deadly terrors' clasped. It re-interprets the different views of teaching English, as drawn up in the United Kingdom's Cox Report. It argues that these views…

In our ostensibly secular age, discussing the real-world contexts and impacts of religious traditions in the classroom can be difficult. Religious traditions may appear at different times to different students as too irrelevant, too personal, or too inflammatory to allow them to engage openly with the materials, the issues, and each other. In this…

Baby Suggs's sermon in the clearing to formerly enslaved Black folx offers readers an important anecdote about living in the afterlife of white supremacy (Hartman, 2007; Sharpe, 2016). Baby Suggs seemed to understand that the priority for survival and emancipation was loving one's flesh in a world where "yonder they do not love your…

Progressive education is often examined through the lens of curricular theorists, educational historians, and the experience of practitioners. One perspective, infrequently found in the debate, has been the experiences of students educated under the progressive philosophy. The Southern author, Flannery O'Connor, who attended progressive schools on…

The religious thought of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy is a well documented but often overlooked example of unorthodox Christianity. This paper uses the example of Tolstoy's religious thinking to question the integrity of the current representation of Christianity in UK schools. It also uses Tolstoy's criticism of orthodox Christianity to suggest a…

When Don Imus made his infamous comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team in 2007, he provoked widespread (yet short-lived) attention to the circulation of language practices demeaning to women of color. In an elective autobiographical writing course that the author designed with and for urban high school girls, the students…

Contrasts the complaints of a class of gifted students about Dickens' novel "A Tale of Two Cities" with their teacher's discomfort at sitting through the long and tedious movie "Brazil." (NKA)

A humorous depiction of a class discussion of "Up from Slavery"; part of the author's forthcoming book, "Miss LePage and the Classics." (Editor/RD)

Suggests using Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" as a rhetorical exemplum in literature instruction. Calls upon instructors to identify Thoreau's writing purposes and intended audience. Suggests that students can explore the book's varied writing styles and narrative personae. Encourages analysis of the book's ethical, rational,…

The author found "This Bridge Called My Back" at the local public library when she was, at age thirty-three, finally beginning to write again, and write honestly. There were Indian voices in "Bridge"--a few poems or personal narratives that moved her, but which barely began to represent the range of the writers or the…