Purpose: Research on nonschool settings suggests young people benefit from digital multimodal composition. Less is known about how digital composing can support students as they interpret required literary class texts. To understand the potential benefits and challenges of digitally composing for literary analysis, design interviews with two high…

This essay analyzes student experiences of studying all-female and non-binary cast Shakespeare productions in the Seattle area, including upstart crow collective's "Richard III" and The Fern Shakespeare Company's "Much Ado About Nothing." I draw on my teaching of the experimental work of these regional companies in an…

This case study, which investigates twenty-four 11th-grade students of American literature, asks: What successes and challenges did students experience when reading "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" through a critical race theory (CRT)/critical Whiteness studies (CWS) lens? Findings reveal that applying a CRT/CWS lens helped students…

This short story illustrates an occasion of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogical practices in relation to the canonical texts which are often used in urban classrooms. In it, a lesson on Jane Eyre's childhood point of view and mode of introspectiveness delves into a tale of dancing and Otherness. The story shows that in spaces where…

A conversation between scholars demonstrates how two experts found common ground and made classroom recommendations while wrestling through an underlying question: Who cares about "The Grapes of Wrath?"

The author pushes two desks together in the front of the class and pile supplies on them: markers, drawing paper, rulers, and pencils. As the students enter a combined English language arts (ELA) and English as a New Language (ENL) tenth-grade classroom, they select what they need and settle in to their work. As an ELA educator who is also a…

Write first, talk second--it's a simple strategy, but one that's underused in literature classes, writes Paul Bambrick-Santoyo. The author describes a lesson on Shakespeare's Sonnet 65 conducted by a middle school English teacher, who incorporates writing as an important precursor to classroom discussion. By having students write about the poem…

In this article, Roy Rosenstein shares the events that occurred during his first day of teaching the Dante and Medieval Culture course in the fall semester of 2001 at the American University of Paris (AUP). On, September 11, 2001, immediately following Rosenstein's opening statement of "Welcome to hell," the class was alerted to the…

This article considers the pedagogical nature of an intra-action involving the author, his high school student's final project in an English class (a golem), and his school administrators. The author relies on narrative scholarship to both tell and interpret a story of his experience as a high school English and drama teacher, to illustrate the…

How teachers can use such materials as parallel-text editions, graphic novels, and film adaptations to increase students' understanding of and interest in Shakespeare was the impetus for a classroom action research project that examined the effects of teaching methods on student comprehension and engagement. The author of this article…

This purpose of the study was to determine the effects of teachers using the Question Exploration Routine (QER) in regularly scheduled secondary-level English Language Arts classes to help students answer questions about the development and use of main ideas in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet." Questions were posed in both…

In this paper, we expand on our presentation at ICDS2010 (Dobson et al., 2010) in describing the design of several new forms of interactive visualization intended for teaching the concept of plot in fiction. The most common visualization currently used for teaching plot is a static diagram known as Freytag's Pyramid, which was initially intended…

Middle school students are socially conditioned through an inundation of messages conveyed by various mediums, and language arts teachers are capable of teaching them how to deconstruct messages through exercises in critical literacy. Many language arts teachers are not aware of critical theory and, if they are aware, rely solely on classic…

This document presents the proceedings of the 23nd Annual Research Forum held June 28, 2018, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 12 action research papers: (1) Standards-Based Grading in a Secondary Mathematics Classroom (Michelle Anderson); (2) How the Use of Graphic Novels in Shakespeare…

This article highlights a project that encourages students to connect reading and mathematics instruction by using a data analysis approach. Students analyze sonnets from statistical, literary, and historical points of view in an effort to uncover the true identity of William Shakespeare. (Contains 10 figures.)