"The Ballad of Proxima-B" is an educational RPG that promotes learning and collaboration. Students contribute to world-building and game mechanics, creating fictional worlds and characters, including a dystopian Earth, the planet Proxima-B, and alien races. The game incorporates constructivist, constructionist, and Dynamic Systems Model…

Engaging students in the reading process is challenging when they are unable to connect to texts. It is important to provide inclusive and diverse texts (IDTs) in the language arts curriculum. To promote a positive reading experience, all students need to read IDTs with non-stereotypical depictions of girls, women, people of Color, and more. This…

To engage in critical readings of literary texts, in ways that are also ethical and compassionate, requires readers to enter emotionally and imaginatively into the complex, textual worlds of others as they are portrayed in stories. Such stories have the potential to create new worlds that make visible our collective being in ways that allow us to…

This is an extract from "Politics, Reading and Knowledge about Language", the author's address to the 1991 annual conference of the National Association for the Teaching of English. It describes the moment in 1988 when Kenneth Baker, then Secretary of State for Education and Science, received the report of the Committee of Inquiry into…

This essay discusses the author's use of Charles Dickens's "Sketches by Boz" (1836-39) in an undergraduate Victorian literature and film class as a further way of expanding the possibilities for teaching film with literature. The article begins with a general discussion of Dickens's overall value to author Jeffrey Jackson's idea of the…

There is a large body of research regarding the affective and cathartic benefits of literature, both generalized and related to educational contexts. Anecdotal data carry special profundity and pertinence when considering issues of mortality. This article reviews current literature regarding the practices of reading and writing about death.…

The centennial of the First World War has offered instructors across the humanities an exciting opportunity to enhance students' disciplinary expertise while reflecting on the significance of an event that continues to shape the world today. Drawing on established courses on the history and literature of the war, respectively, the authors designed…

In currently dominant accounts, English as a school subject, its content and processes, are construed as an induction into a well-defined, already-established disciplinary discourse or set of discourses. In an attempt to challenge this version of English, I present some examples of autobiographical writing by secondary students and I tell the…

This article is a discussion of some aspects of reader response. It attempts to track the development of various theories: from the view of the text as an entity set in stone, through structuralist and phenomenological arguments, to the point where the text becomes a virtual dimension. But not only is the importance of the text within the literary…

Nearly every teacher will experience loss and grief during their years in the classroom. And yet, too often the profession assumes that English language arts (ELA) teachers must hide the emotions that accompany loss. In this article the authors share strategies for supporting English teachers in making sense of their grieving experiences and…

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?"

William Blake's poetry seeks to inspire readers to participate in the construction of an intellectual community that he calls "Jerusalem." This process remains ever incomplete and is, in a sense, incompletable, for the work of producing such a community involves "continually building & continually decaying"…

In this article, the authors reflect on their experiences of integrating visual arts, specifically painting, into an English language arts curriculum. Although each of them had previously used art as a response to literature with our students, neither of them had before collaborated with professional artists or been as intentional about…

This short response to the theme of 'Love in English' reflects on the importance of teaching queer and Indigenous literatures within English classes. I share personal perspectives on seeking literature that reflected who I was as a young person developing queer and Indigenous identities. I also share professional experiences from my past English…

By the late 70s the "growth through English" slogan, derived from John Dixon's account of the Dartmouth conference, had become popular around Australia. In 1980 the Sydney IFTE conference featured several Dartmouth veterans; but during that conference, Dartmouth-linked ideas from overseas mingled with lines of local influence, especially…