Teaching students how to think through complex tasks in a deliberate, reflective, and critical manner is an important goal of public schooling as well as literacy education. However, in classrooms, it is typically assumed that the meaning of thinking is established and the way it is taught and learned is straightforward and universally understood.…

This study explores the pedagogical approaches to internationalizing World Literature and English Composition courses at Albany State University, a small HBCU in Albany, Georgia. This attempt to internationalize the World Literature curriculum introduces, adds, and (re)positions strategically multimedia texts, such as "My Mother the Crazy…

Reacting to incoherent English teaching in the 1930s, Percival Gurrey probed the psychological processes involved in literary appreciation. He sought ways of teaching poetry that avoided lifeless tasks such as labelling "poetic devices." Later, in the 1950s, he wrote about the processes involved in learning to write. At a time when…

This article provides a description of three seventh grade English teachers' attempt to augment creativity, reading, and deep understanding, and the standards they used to come up with five essential questions surrounding an eight-week unit on poetry. Each of these questions helps to address the school standards and the Common Core State Standards…

Starting with the writer's own experience as a reader, this article discusses poetry by Eric Roach, Derek Walcott, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Edward Baugh, Michael Smith and Velma Pollard. It explores the sense of place felt by writer and reader, going on to analyse the poets' use of Nation Language, poetic metre and intertextuality in…

It is not clear that the literary genre called poetry has a future in the face of a reduction in literary study that Common Core's English language arts standards implicitly mandate-- and in the context of Common Core's drive for workforce development. Common Core claims the standards will prepare students equally for "college and…

There is an educational disconnect between students' individual backgrounds and the instruction that they traditionally receive in school (Darling-Hammond 3). This division is even more severe for black, Latino/Latina, and economically underprivileged students, who often lack the support, experience, or resources to fully engage in…

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 paper explores the impact of a Spoken Word Education Programme (SWEP hereafter) on young people's engagement with poetry in a group of schools in London, UK. It does so with reference to the secondary Discourses of school-based learning and the Spoken Word community, an artistic "community of practice" into which they were being…

Shows how dwelling on a great poem will continually deepen one's sense of delight. (EL)

Conveys personal response to poetry. Ponders the mystery of learning and the relationship of literature to life. (EL)

Describes how a high school English instructor used the Valdez oil spill to illustrate the meaning in Samuel Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." (PRA)

Provides five responses to Edward Lasky's article, "A Modern Day Albatross: The Valdez and Some of Life's Other Spills" in the same issue of this journal. (PRA)

Discusses use of the poem in literature classes. (AA)

Describes the first in a series of poetry workshops for children from the upper secondary school years. (AA)