Recent reforms to Initial Teacher Education in England are a continuation of a decades-long political project, aiming to change the whole social complex around teachers' professional education. But the most recent frameworks present some new inflections to the construction of learning, pedagogical relationships and difference. Positivist versions…

This study investigates the impact of cultural and politico-religious dominance on the practice of critical reading (CR) of texts by a group of Iranian postgraduate students in Australia. Four postgraduate students were interviewed individually four times (each time for reading one text) for critical understanding of two pairs of Persian texts,…

This article examines the deeper purposes behind the teaching of creative writing. To extend an analogy created by William Blake in his poem 'The Tyger', its furnaces are examined and its 'deadly terrors' clasped. It re-interprets the different views of teaching English, as drawn up in the United Kingdom's Cox Report. It argues that these views…

In Morocco, debates over English language instruction have marginalized poetry as a distinct literary genre. The shortage of poetry events arguably makes poetry teaching both daunting and intimidating. Besides fostering trust, memorization, and empathy, helping students develop a penchant for English language, as well as humanity, poetry, and…

The act of teaching is constituted by tensions between contradictory influences of national educational systems, teachers' professional/personal identity, cultural and social values. Qualitative research methods can explore this complex situation. Indeed, narrative methods have explored teachers' "life histories". This article provides a…

Our study concerns adolescents using poetry writing as an interrogative and creative means of shaping and creating "voices" or "identities." Toronto-based high school students were challenged to be creators (rather than solely consumers) of available social practices within a digital landscape using mobile devices and social…

This article will discuss my often challenging transition from radical political poet to full time poet teacher in a Roman Catholic secondary school. Can the counter-cultural art form of spoken word education thrive within the institution of school? By looking at classroom and after school experience, student poems and relevant theory, the paper…

When Don Imus made his infamous comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team in 2007, he provoked widespread (yet short-lived) attention to the circulation of language practices demeaning to women of color. In an elective autobiographical writing course that the author designed with and for urban high school girls, the students…

Describes a study in which students taught by a creative method liked poetry more and understood it better than those taught by a directed method. (DD)

Indicates some of the problems students encounter in interpreting poetry and cites the reasons that students express for liking or disliking poetry. (RB)

The article stresses the importance for teachers to teach poetry for what it is and can do, and trust that the student will find for it a place in his own life. (Author/LF)

Considers the burgeoning field of poetry and verse for children now compared to the beginning of the twentieth century. Explores if there is genuine poetry in today's abundance of children's verse. Considers what critics and poets consider to be genuine poetry and where the children themselves stand on the subject of poetry. (SG)

A replication of I. A. Richards' study of students' reactions to thirteen poems in the 1920s. (DD)

A study of students' reactions to four of the thirteen poems used in I. A. Richards' study in the 1920s. (DD)

The wisdom of introducing college freshmen to poetry through destructive literary criticism--a negative assessment of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" is the example here--is questioned. The underlying assumption that a student's taste may be formed by explaining literary standards to him, illustrated by examples of poor poetry, is subjected to…