Visible teaching invites educators to bring activist and change-agent identities directly into their teaching, working collaboratively with a community to enact sustainable, albeit constantly transforming, societal change. This article uses data from a year-long ethnographic study to paint a portrait of one Chicana veteran teacher who enacts an…

For most Anglophone countries, the history of grammar teaching over the past 50 years is one of contestation, debate and dissent: and 50 years on we are no closer to reaching a consensus about the role of grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum. The debate has been described through the metaphor of battle and grammar wars (Kamler, 1995;…

The need for English and literacy curriculum to connect with young people's lifeworlds to build bridges and frames of reference that connect traditional English curriculum with digital texts and literacies, are increasing priorities in curriculum frameworks in Australia and elsewhere. This paper reports on a project in which the authors worked…

Molly Poland is a first year English and Home Economics teacher who began her career in a small Far North Queensland town. In this article, she writes about her first year teaching and the last year of her degree and the challenges she faced as both teacher and student. Reading Boomer's "Negotiating the Curriculum" forced her to think a…

Young adult literature is a tool of socialisation and acculturation for young readers. This extends to endowing "reading" with particular significance in terms of what literature should be read and why. This paper considers some recent young adult fiction with an eye to its engagement with canonical literature and its representations of…

It is not clear that the literary genre called poetry has a future in the face of a reduction in literary study that Common Core's English language arts standards implicitly mandate-- and in the context of Common Core's drive for workforce development. Common Core claims the standards will prepare students equally for "college and…

As well as maintaining the central role of literature, the new Australian Curriculum: English emphasises the multimodal nature of literacy and requires students in primary and secondary schools to develop explicit knowledge about visual and verbal grammar as a resource for text interpretation and text creation. This study investigated the use of…

This paper suggests how the "weird fiction" of H.P. Lovecraft might be mobilised within secondary English classrooms to examine aspects of visual literacy, literary style, narrative form and intertextuality. The approach that is outlined is characterised, after Lovecraft's famous monster, as a "Cthulhuic literacy" and is…

This essay explores the role that storytelling might play in the professional learning of English teachers. It begins by reflecting on the ways that stories shape our everyday lives, and then considers how the meaning-making potential of storytelling might enable us to gain insights into our work as educators. This is in contradistinction to the…

This article extends the conversation on English education as preparation for democratic participation. The author journeys through a cycle of action research, analyzing one classroom case study to improve her practice of curricular negotiation in a methods of teaching writing course.

Today, English is truly regarded as an international language. It is the most widely-learned and spoken second or foreign language in many countries. In recent years, the number of second and foreign language speakers has far exceeded the number of first language speakers of English. This dramatic change, many have argued, should be taken into…

Harvard served as a model for English Departments in the past and, with its 2008-2009 changes, it seems to take the mantle in providing yet another model. However, I propose a much more radical approach to creating an undergraduate "English" curriculum that does more than push the boundaries of traditional study of English literatures. I…

The Post Graduate Teachers who teach English as a second language to Higher Secondary Classes that is 11th and 12th grades need to cultivate a good sense of appreciation for poetry. They must have an inherent thirst for reading poetry aloud and competence to elucidate the essential characteristics of poetry. A study was launched to understand the…

One of the more difficult 19th-century American texts for high school students to read is undoubtedly Henry David Thoreau's "Walden." His erudite allusions, often page-long sentences, and sophisticated sense of the ironic initially leave many students cold. Still, the author encourages them to read amid the din of a cultural cacophony that shouts…

Garth Boomer's democratic and often provocative vision for English teaching continues to play an important part in the professional development of English teachers. In particular, Boomer's work is often used by Teacher Educators in preservice degrees to introduce emerging English teachers to key ideas such as curriculum negotiation and…