Recent reforms to Initial Teacher Education in England are a continuation of a decades-long political project, aiming to change the whole social complex around teachers' professional education. But the most recent frameworks present some new inflections to the construction of learning, pedagogical relationships and difference. Positivist versions…

The Common Core State Standards for the English Language Arts, together with the new tests being developed to assess them, are placing a greater emphasis on writing in elementary schools than in the recent past. This article explores similarities and differences of the standards with past state standards, explaining the reason both for why things…

Literary criticism in the form of the so-called book report, may, therefore, wrote Stephen Bloore in 1934, "be a most valuable aid to independent thought if it is not used merely to check up on the books supposedly read by a student". For a century, "English Journal" has been a map and a narrative of the discourse about teaching ELA as well as the…

Jory Brass and Leslie David Burns provide a useful and informative review of research appearing in the "English Journal" ("EJ") and "Research in the Teaching of English" ("RTE") over the past 100 years. It is a bit unfortunate, if understandable, to exclude books and articles in other journals, because such a restriction excludes many pieces of…

Elaborates on the continual problem of male dominance in literature, as it pervades the literary canon, literary criticism, and the language. Suggests how changes can be made through the application of feminist criticism. (KEH)

Although college teachers of English face a very real economic crisis, the current intellectual crisis is even more significant. The first failure of this intellectual crisis involves what we have done: we have replaced true scholarship with the new interpretation of texts, mistakenly believing that we need not know any outside knowledge of a…

Discussing the structural and philosophic changes in higher education, the author feels that because of its academic purity, poetry may help to bring about a new humanism." (Author/MB)

Discusses the teaching of literature in an instrumentalist or bureaucratic culture. Gives examples of instrumentalist influence in the English department at the University of Iowa: changes in department offerings, the emergence of a new departmental coherence, and the concentration of literary theory in the program of comparative literature. (EL)

Discusses approaches to teaching literature in high schools during an era of retrenchment and calls for a return to the "basics." Considers rationales for making literature study relevant to students' and society's needs. (JT)

Examines the sociolinguistic and structuralist traditions of English teaching in Great Britain. Suggests a curriculum systhesizing elements from these two traditions and a progressive/arts tradition. (ARH)

Explores the possible intersections between postmodern theory and educational change. Attacks recent backlashes against postmodernism as counterproductive. Describes today's students as inhabitants of a border region between modernism and postmodern culture, as seen in recent films about adolescents. Relates such a view to pedagogical change. (HB)

A statement officially adopted by the Board of Directors of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is presented. The position is taken that the amount and effects of racism and bias in English and Language Arts educational materials cannot be ignored. Specifically, educational materials now suffer from the following crucial…