Teaching and reading literature are commonly viewed as contributing to the cultivation of empathy. This article presents critical and pedagogical approaches to test this view and suggests a distinction between low-level, simple empathy inspired by the reading and teaching of "The Tortilla Curtain" and a more complex, self-critical…

To engage in critical praxis, teachers of literary response writing need concepts and methods for understanding the efficacy of teaching practices in helping students develop particular dispositions towards texts and the social issues they represent. In this article, the author uses concepts from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and Systemic…

Baby Suggs's sermon in the clearing to formerly enslaved Black folx offers readers an important anecdote about living in the afterlife of white supremacy (Hartman, 2007; Sharpe, 2016). Baby Suggs seemed to understand that the priority for survival and emancipation was loving one's flesh in a world where "yonder they do not love your…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the responses and perceptions of Israeli Arab teachers toward multicultural and educational issues concerning Jewish-Arab relations. Design/methodology/approach: This study is a qualitative research. The study included 44 novice Arab teachers, who teach Hebrew in the Arab sector and are currently studying toward…

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…

Using Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" as an anchor text, the authors argue for applied theatre strategies as vivid and viable tools for exploring challenging texts and applying critical lenses in an embodied way. Readers are guided through a series of theatre-based, English-classroom accessible improvisational frameworks to help…

Situated at the intersections of ethnography, childhood studies, literary studies, and education research, this reception study seeks to access real children's responses to a particular text, and to offer empirical description of actual reading experiences. Survey data is generated by taking advantage of an online resource: an archive of…

Issue devoted to the teaching of foreign literatures. (DS)

Contrasts the complaints of a class of gifted students about Dickens' novel "A Tale of Two Cities" with their teacher's discomfort at sitting through the long and tedious movie "Brazil." (NKA)

Despite a growing body of work that draws attention to the presence of violence in the mass media and its effects on youth, little critical attention has been paid to the role of violence in young adult literature. The authors believe that by bringing violence to the foreground in the study of texts, they can enrich and deepen what these stories…

When social critiques of a book outweigh its own social critiques, should professors still require students to read it? In this article, the author shares how he responds to a student's critiques of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," a text in a course he was teaching on obsession. The author has been teaching "Heart of Darkness" for nearly 30…

Defends Blume's works by presenting internal evidence displaying the honesty and lack of exaggeration that make her books popular with adolescents and unpopular with critics. (CRH)

Senior English students, in spite of themselves, respond to Dickens both critically and emotionally. Impressed by Dickens'"artistry of style," they nonetheless disagree with each other over whether his characters are believable and whether the exaggeration of character traits is an effective device. The deepest level of understanding…

This volume contains 1970-71 Literature assessment exercises (all in the public domain) which have been selected for release at this time by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Information furnished for each exercise includes: the literature objective it was designed to measure, the theme (section) in which it appears, relevant…