My thoughts on the question of 'Textuality as the Centre of English' were presented at a Roundtable session at the 2020 International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE) Conference. Through critical discourse analysis of media and curriculum texts, I highlight how the 'being' of the English subjects is always and already textual in…

In evaluating some of Heaney's prose writings about the art of poetry -- what I have called his 'Poetics' -- the paper explores how those ideas could enhance the teaching of poetry in the upper post-primary schools. The paper is divided into four closely interconnected sections. The first section evaluates Heaney's thoughts about the potential…

Drawn from an ethnographic study of spoken word poetry in Australia, this article offers case studies of two youth poets and follows their journeys with spoken word over three years as they performed in community-based slams, engaged with the New South Wales English Extension 2 curriculum, and served as mentor poets in culturally and…

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…

This article explores how Australian English teachers can thoughtfully and critically address the cross-curriculum priority 'Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia' in secondary classrooms. It builds on our prior research, which highlighted factors that shape teacher attitudes towards addressing this cross-curriculum priority, the perceived…

This article explores the views of children's poet Michael Rosen in relation to poetry in education. It is based on an interview in which Rosen not only discusses the significance of encouraging young people to engage with poetry at school but also analyzes a number of threats to poetry's place in the English curriculum. This article identifies…

This article takes as its focus Lefebvre's trialectic of conceived, perceived and lived spaces as a lens through which to scrutinise the 2013 English Literature Curriculum, and to explore the extent to which creative spaces might exist within that curriculum. The article analyses how the curriculum is envisaged by policymakers and how it might be…

Drawing on a strand of findings from the Cambridge Poetry Teaching Project, a small-scale research study co-ordinated through the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, this article examines contemporary understandings of poetry performance in teaching contexts. Positioning these understandings in relation to past practices, we…

Poetry, as a textual form for critical study and composition, continues to occupy a significant place in Australian senior secondary English syllabus documents and classrooms (cf. Carter, 2012). Indeed, within the senior secondary English syllabus in New South Wales (NSW), poetry remains one of the core mandatory types of texts for study by the…

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…

This article explores the changing place of poetry studies in the broader English curriculum of Victoria, Australia. Its focus is on how students learning to become English teachers engage with poetry studies. Setting this problem within the context of pedagogical theory and evidence about the evolving Victorian curriculum, we have interviewed six…

This paper presents a comparative evaluation of boys' and girls' responses to poetry at Key Stage 4 in a selection of schools in Northern Ireland. It is predicated on the idea of the central importance of poetry within the English curriculum and also on the assertion that the imaginative and broader educational benefits to be gained from fostering…

This article explores the use of digital poetry in a secondary English classroom and its implications for adolescents' multimodal composition and identity development. The authors--an English teacher and a library media specialist--collaborated over the course of three years to design, implement, and reiterate a digital poetry curriculum. Through…

As U.K. school exam results continue to rise, perennial accusations appear in the media of the "dumbing down" of the curriculum and of employers' complaints about school leavers' lack of basic literacy skills. In this context, Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, has raised questions about how to provide an inspiring English curriculum, the…

Discusses ways to encourage children to write original poetry and provides samples of student works. Over a 10-week period introduced children to 3 types of poems: noisy poems (focusing on noises and sounds related to the topic), poems for 2 voices (dialog poems written in 2 vertical columns), and free poetry (poetry without rhyme or meter). (MDM)