This paper is prompted by the author's experience as a researcher of English literary education in three different geographies over the past three years: Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Affect theory, as discussed in this paper, concerns atmospheres, surfaces, bodies, emotions, moods, vicinities and capacities. Drawing on affect theory,…

This article is equal parts educational history and political philosophy. We aim to remind readers that subject English (SE) and indeed state education emerge from the contradictory impulses of classical liberalism, and that, more than simply resembling citizenship education, SE emerges in the first instance as a form of highly normativising…

In universities, as in mainstream education more widely, cognitive approaches to poetry are often dominant. Far from being irrelevant to the serious study of literature, we argue that eliciting students' affective responses to poetry can deepen their cognitive understanding and analytical skills. Drawing on recent research in psychology on the…

This essay questions the place that conversations about 'race' hold in the English classroom. I hope to reveal the problems that may come with easily dismissing tense and racially charged dialogues about language and identity. I also explore the way classroom talk opens up an opportunity for students to create and contest different meanings and…

In this article, Jeanne Dyches investigates the ways in which inquiry models of instruction have failed to provide students with a space in which to grapple with discipline-specific histories and hegemonies. Accordingly, this study offers critical canon pedagogy (CCP) to help students problematize and disrupt the practices specific to a…

This article argues that in order to encourage English graduates to expand their horizons, educators should diversify the range of assessments and offer greater opportunities for public engagement. Through a detailed analysis of the final-year elective, "Literature & Medicine," the authors explore the ways in which the design and…

In this article, we offer an account of a two-day workshop conducted with a group of postgraduate English and Drama student teachers, part of a larger AHRC-funded research project. Our focus is on reading and the reception of a canonical text, in this case Beowulf. We argue that taking a transmedia approach helps learners to think about the…

Because of the emphasis placed on nonfiction and informational texts by the Common Core State Standards, literature teachers all over the country are re-evaluating their curriculum and looking for thoughtful ways to incorporate nonfiction into their courses. They are also rethinking their pedagogy as they consider ways to approach texts that are…

In literature, composition, and other areas of English Studies, relateability can be an important tool to inscribe marginalized subjects as academic citizens. However, its larger arc reproduces ethnocentric and individualistic ideologies at the national and personal levels that foreclose the true understanding of and engagement with Otherness that…

Though there is little in the literature on the teaching of the history of English, criticism of textbooks which over-simplify "the" story as the rise of the standard variety has been more vocal of late. Meanwhile, some academics have argued for focusing teaching on the analysis of texts. This article reports on a unit/module taught at a…

This paper draws on Gramsci's concept of hegemony to locate the Newbolt Report, published in 1921, within a context of the weakening political authority of Britain's ruling class. One indication of this is the fact that in 1917 200,000 workers were involved in strikes in 48 British towns. The moral and cultural dimensions of the problems facing…

This article examines the author's interactions with the teaching strategy known as Reciprocal Teaching, sometimes also called Reciprocal Reading, which involves students learning to read collaboratively in small groups. Reciprocal Teaching typically involves students teaching each other by following a rubric of activities that are aimed at…

This essay emerges from my position as a new trainee teacher, entering my first school, a school as unique and also as typical as any. What struck me was the complexity of the school's culture (and counter-cultures). Language was revealed as a site of resistance, a clash between staff and pupils at the point of instruction; a reluctance to read or…

John Dixon's book "Growth through English" (1967) is both an account of the four-week Anglo-American seminar on the teaching of English held in Dartmouth, New Hampshire, in 1966 and a seminal text in English studies. Fifty years later, its holding concept of "growth" remains significant to the identity of the profession…

Since its publication in 1921, "The Teaching of English in England," otherwise known as the Newbolt Report, has informed both the shape of English as a school subject and the discourse about the teaching of English in England. The 1960s saw the report as promoting a cultural heritage rooted in outdated social values; the 1970s explored…