This is a conceptual paper that explores critiquing picturebooks set in Africa. The paper is grounded in BlackCrit (Black Critical Theory) and Racial and Ethnic Socialization (RES). Using pragmatism as a method, we offer a detailed analysis of 3 carefully selected books, on the broad basis of authenticity, accuracy, and respectfulness. A deeper…

Narrative in a United States survey course is hard to avoid. The question that the author has confronted in his classes is simple: do narratives still work in the surveys now that students understand their subjectivity, in many cases, as much as their teachers? Students, like most humans, tend to like stories. As the humanities at large and…

Students in the English Language Arts classroom have access to more author commentary than ever. While following authors on social media may deepen students' engagement with their assigned reading, it also threatens to subdue students' own interpretations of the authors' texts. This essay explains how educators can introduce basic aspects of…

The term "freethinking" originated in the 17th century to describe inquiry into beliefs which were accepted unquestioningly. Feminists such as Mary Wolstonecraft, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, and novelists such as Mark Twain and Zora Neal Hurston are among the many who dared to simultaneously challenge religious dogma,…

What is thought, and how can it be taught? Philosophy and literature have often promoted different conceptions although each requires, consciously or not, a mutually inclusive understanding. The question of value, which lurks at the centre of this, was given special salience by the literary critic, and 'anti-philosopher', F. R. Leavis who still…

A decade after the publication of Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, the influence of John Hattie's statistical work continues to grow. This paper critically examines one aspect of Hattie's 'synthesis' of education meta-analyses, his summation of research data for whole language literacy teaching. Of…

Fyodor Dostoevsky's final novel, "The Brothers Karamazov," is one of the most influential works of the nineteenth century. To date, however, the potential value of the book for educationists has been largely ignored. This article addresses a key pedagogical theme in "The Brothers Karamazov," namely, the notion that 'love is a…

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…

In this article, Anders Öhman discusses Gert J. J. Biesta's concept of the risk of education and what it could mean for the study of literature in the classroom. The article's point of departure is Bakhtin's theory of the utterance. The utterance, for Bakhtin, has to be embodied, that is, it has to be governed by a purpose: it must be uttered by…

LGBTQ+ identities complicate the ways in which #OwnVoices can be deployed in literary analysis and author studies. Recognizing LGBTQ+ identities in literature is about more than just the text; it is about the visibility and success of LGBTQ+ authors as well. Through a discussion of reader response theory and politics of recognition, the author…

This article is meant as a useful classroom methodology by which teachers of literature may give their students a coherent rubric for understanding literary meaning and exegesis which can incorporate most literary theories while addressing the basic-to-advanced concepts required of literary students. Also, it will provide a working methodology for…

When preparing specialists of Oriental studies, reading fiction in the language being studied is very effective for mastering a foreign language. The fiction text reflects not only the richness of a language and style, but also features of the development of the standard language and changes in its lexical composition. It is also expedient not…

Critiquing two approaches that English teachers use to teach Black, or African-American, literature in the secondary classroom--one that centralises races and the other that ignores it--this article proposes a hybrid approach that combines both. This double-faced approach recognises the culturally specific themes that give the text and the Black…

The present study aims at presenting a thorough account of the field termed literary pragmatics which emerges in a consequence of applying the different pragmatic approaches to the study and analysis of literary genera. Additionally, it also attempts to explore and shed some light on the relationship between the two domains: pragmatics and…

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…