All too often lost in the pressure and intensity of the current practice of English teachers and literacy educators is due acknowledgement of the continuing importance of history. This paper brings together two concerns: the work of Margaret Meek Spencer as a key figure in the history of English teaching, reading pedagogy and literacy education,…

Lily Rosene began her teaching career in 2020 when COVID-19 derailed her career plans and anearby school was desperate for teachers. She entered her first 9th-grade English classroom without a clear understanding of her students or the curriculum. However, she knew reading was important to any English classroom, so she decided to make silent…

The many manifestations of social justice education center the experiences of the marginalized and oppressed to create a more democratic society. In recent years, scholars have begun to argue that privileged students, not the marginalized, should be the target of social justice education, advocating for a pedagogy that puts the onus on the…

This autobiographical essay explores the significance that Marxist literary theory has had for me as an English educator. Marxist literary theorists have produced increasingly refined understandings of the formal complexities of literary works, but the reach of such criticism has been limited because they have failed to conceive it as part of a…

While immersive technology has migrated from specialized industry use to wholesale classroom applications, high school student reading of classical literature in secondary English classrooms has declined. At the start of the 2020s American education's dependence on technology increased as a necessary institutional response to the COVID-19…

The body biography, a visual and written life-size composition to study characterization, makes use of a variety of materials such as markers, crayons, and found material from wrapping paper to remnants of string and yarn. In this study, three teachers were invited to implement the body biography practice as part of their delivery of the English…

In the United States, standardized tests shape what, how, and why English Language Arts teachers teach. For the last generation, these tests have increasingly taken a narrowly text-centered approach to literature, making it difficult to enact or research alternatives. But what if it were otherwise? In the current study, we asked teachers to…

Although reading comprehension research and instruction commonly focus on individuals' ability to extract meaning from text, eighth-grade students whose teachers chose to focus on engaged volitional reading, rather than comprehension, demonstrated expansive forms of meaning-making and purpose. Interviews and observations across two school years…

The author was greatly honoured to give the Garth Boomer address in 2020. In the strange year 2020, the author "spoke" at the superbly organised online event. In this article the author restates and reframes the case for literature teaching in English classrooms across the globe by arguing for it from the perspectives of modern…

The purpose of this article is to present the findings of a qualitative content analysis of historical documents related to the teaching of literature. Through a social semiotics framework, we analyzed 10 national standards documents in the field of secondary English. Our analysis details the evolution of the standards paradigm for teaching…

This article presents the work of two female students in a rural school who were assigned to respond to a Shakespearean text with a Digital Video (DV) project. The study shows how the teacher provided students appropriate time, mediation, and space in allowing them to bring their out-of-school literacies and interests within an academic context.…

With the advancement of technology and series of curriculum reform, teachers are challenged to recalibrate their teaching methodology and delivery of instruction. Teachers may adopt ways to improve the quality of instruction everyday. In order to achieve this goal, teachers may opt to use variety of instructional methods and techniques such as…

Purpose: This paper aims to draw from work in the field of English that questions the "limits of critique" (Felski, 2015) in order to consider the limits of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction. The study focuses on the relational and affective demands that resistant reading places on readers and texts.…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of…

Since "English Journal's" (EJ's) founding in 1912, contributors have asked how literature shapes students' ethics, or morals. Ethics, on this account, is about people's ways of imagining and leading good lives. EJ authors explore how reading literature can help students see themselves and the wider world in light of visions of the good…