Cultivating "wenhua dacai" (great cultural talent) is a central goal of the ongoing "dujing" (classics reading) education movement, which is an integral part of the broad Confucian revival in contemporary China. Focusing on the concept of "wenhua dacai," this article explores three interrelated issues. First, as a…

This study explores the dialogues about social values, emotions and feelings that emerge during the implementation of dialogic literary gatherings (DLG). DLG is a classroom-based program grounded in the dialogic reading of classic books. Ten DLG sessions with fourth-grade students (n = 126) were implemented in five elementary schools in Spain. The…

The study of classics has been part of Australian and New Zealand higher education from the beginnings of tertiary education in these countries, followed shortly after by the study of ancient history. This article offers an analysis of current units of study in each Australian and New Zealand public university that continues to teach classics and…

This paper investigates the strategies of governance in the language policy "Chanting the Chinese Classics" (CCC) as deployed by State authorities, schools, and local communities. It highlights the strategy of 'viewing' as a nexus between language policy processes and traditional Chinese governing philosophy. To examine the connections…

The resurgence of Confucian education in present-day China has received increasing academic attention over the last two decades. However, certain aspects of this trend remain poorly understood, particularly parents' involvement in their children's Confucian education. Based on a qualitative study conducted at a Confucian school, this article sheds…

The Humanities Institute of Universidad Panamericana, Guadalajara (Mexico), has carefully crafted its own reading canon by incorporating in to its course design a learning outcomes framework that mirrors its Christian institutional mission. The paper presents an overview of this framework and of its implementation within the University's Gen Ed…

Henrik Ibsen's play "Peer Gynt" digs deep into the question of what it means to be oneself. An upcoming computer game version invites players to take on the role of Peer and thereby raises new questions about identity and identification. By recording dyads of students who play an early version of the game and analysing their interaction…

The impetus behind the development of this research is to study the potential influence(s) of cartoons (caricatures) on L2 learners in terms of gaining cultural awareness and enhancing their motivation levels. To that end, three English classics in the form of cartoons, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Romeo & Juliet by William…

Every year since 2007, the Globe Theatre has run the "Playing Shakespeare" project, largely funded by Deutsche Bank. This has three main components: school-based workshops, CPD sessions for teachers and free performances for school students. From 2014 to 2016, we were commissioned to evaluate this project. In what follows, we reflect on…

Purpose: This paper focuses on the affordances of and issues surrounding the teaching of George Orwell's novel "1984" (1949) as a set text for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) English and English Literature in an examination-obsessed and heavily surveilled school system. It considers this by focussing on the classroom…

The paper presents the results of the research in the framework of the current trends in linguistics--text linguistics and stylistics. Now that the concept of the language norm is blurred to some extent due to the strong phenomena in language and speech dynamics, the language of texts for children should be treated with special attention and care,…

Despite growing attention paid to the language ideologies of teachers as actors in bilingualism or multilingualism studies, little research has examined whether and how power dynamics between majority and minority languages play a role in the promulgation of a majority language to ethnic minority learners of that majority language. This paper…

Normative notions that classical Chinese texts support authoritarian practices eclipse the possibility that the texts can become contemporary educational resources. Oriented by a conception of relationality, the research engages a Foucauldian approach to writing history as genealogy to argue that the political use of the so-called Confucian texts…

This article explores the conceptualization of cosmopolitan citizen and the relevant teaching practice in the emerging Confucian classical education in contemporary China. It addresses two aspects. First, the cosmopolitan orientation of the cultural subject constructed in the theory of classics-reading education is embedded in the presupposition…

This paper reports on findings from the author's Masters of Education project in which Classics as an after-school curriculum enhancement programme was offered to Year 9 pupils (aged 13-14) in a maintained school in Salford. The programme also incorporated excursions to supplement the extracurricular lessons delivered by the researcher (a…