Purpose: This paper aims to examine how evangelical teachers' religious identities influence their interpretation and teaching of texts in high school English Language Arts classrooms. Further, this paper examines how evangelical teachers make choices about how to balance the demands of their religious and teacher identities as they interact with…

In this study, we explore discussions of literature in a high school English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, examining how students read rhetorically. Reading rhetorically considers the ethical effects of narrative content as it is mediated through character dialogue and action, narrator discourse, and the author's organization: a narrative as a…

Culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) has emerged as an essential way to value the evolution of culture among diverse learners. Discussions around teaching in a culturally sustaining manner in the English language arts classroom, specifically when teaching literary analysis, often address the need to incorporate multicultural literature so…

In this narrative inquiry, the author dramatises the tensions and discoveries that emerged in a literature course for pre-service and in-service teachers in an English education graduate programme. The students' resistance to the instructor's choice of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" as a central text led to reflection on responsible and…

This essay draws on the work of Raymond Williams in identifying a shift from the attempt to have students engage with literary texts in personal terms to a concern, founded on theoretical innovation, that they should read at a more sophisticated level in order to discern the ideology of a given text. It argues that what Williams calls an…

Based on classroom readings and discussions of William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," this Voices from the Field article examines the ways that teachers might use traditional canonized texts to encourage students to both critique and react against bullying behaviors. The author's experiences detail the narratives that students…

This article describes a recent implementation of digital literacies in which high school literature students engaged in literary analysis of a novel using the video game Minecraft. Students who had previously expressed reluctance with reading and dissatisfaction with school experiences used their gaming skills to re-create scenes, respond to…

The high school English classroom is a complex space of literacy practices and communicative interaction. Teachers and students engage in literature study in ways that are dialogic and multifaceted. The navigation of both print and digital texts along with the constructive operations surrounding those texts including the textual operations…

The aim of the present article is to help students realize that Petrarchism has been an influential source of inspiration for Early Modern English lyrics. Its topics and conventions have lent themselves to a wide variety of appropriations which the present selection of texts for analysis tries to illustrate. A few telling examples from Spenser,…

Recently Australia has witnessed a revival of concern about the place of Australian literature within the school curriculum. This has occurred within a policy environment where there is increasing emphasis on Australia's place in a world economy, and on the need to encourage young people to think of themselves in a global context. These dimensions…

Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of the most widely taught texts in language arts classrooms through the English-speaking world and is greatly valued by many readers today for its depiction of youth grappling with racism in the American South of the Depression Era. However, the novel's subtle and sustained critique of…

One of the greatest challenges for English language arts teachers today is the call to engage students in more complex texts. Tim Gillespie, who has taught in public schools for almost four decades, has found the lenses of literary criticism a powerful tool for helping students tackle challenging literary texts. Tim breaks down the dense language…

In his paper in "English in Australia" in 2002, Bill Green called for a literacy project of our own, and for the need to think again, and think newly about the place of literary literacy within contemporary curriculum. But what does literary literacy mean in curriculum that recognises a wide diversity of texts and literacies? If…

The author discusses the validity of various approaches to, and interpretations of, a literary work. (MM)

Developed as part of a high school quinmester unit on approaches to literary criticism, this guide provides the teacher with teaching strategies for an investigation of five major intellectual points of view from which literary works are analyzed and judged. A specific literary work (in novel, poem, short story, or other form) is discussed and…