This article discusses and elaborates on the insights gained from the teaching of a course in "Environment, Literature and Culture" at a university in the north of Thailand. The course was designed as an invitation to English major students to develop sustain-abilities (vulner-abilities, attend-abilities, and response-abilities). In an…

Bringing real-life cases to the educational environment and presenting them to students is one of the main goals of psychology. However, this is unfortunately not as easy as it is said, both ethically and practically. Since the educational materials to be offered to students on this subject are insufficient, academics and lecturers recommend that…

Today, teaching literature has an established place within the school and university curricula in Western and East Asian countries. This seems so natural that we take the educational role of literature for granted. However, history teaches us that elevating literature to an academic subject required a defense of literature against the critical…

The article analyses in detail two lessons that were part of a larger research project on English teaching in Canada, England and Scotland. It considers whether the two English lessons are by their nature both dialogic and formative in practice. The research undertaken was carried out using arts-based criticism. It found that Eaglestone's notion…

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…

This article explores how literary study engages readers' moral perception and imagination. Although some philosophers discuss reading as a largely solitary activity, this article explores social practices of reading common in English language arts classrooms in secondary schools. The article shows how reading with others can change the quality of…

This essay uses the metaphor of "savvy travelling" to discuss the limitations and problems associated with three current "best practice" approaches to the reading of literature in upper grade levels, particularly in the United States: close reading, response-based reading, and disciplinary literacy. A "savvy" approach…

Recent debates among scholars in Literature education have led to polarizing views about the aims of the subject. The debate reignites ancient quarrels about the aesthetic and political values of literary study and relatedly, the different pedagogical approaches to teaching. In the first part of this paper, I explore the aesthetic-political divide…

What is thought, and how can it be taught? Philosophy and literature have often promoted different conceptions although each requires, consciously or not, a mutually inclusive understanding. The question of value, which lurks at the centre of this, was given special salience by the literary critic, and 'anti-philosopher', F. R. Leavis who still…

This article draws from a year-long ethnographic study documenting the use of comics in a school. Focusing on literacy work in a social studies classroom, it documents how comics were welcomed into and challenged classroom spaces. Comics were introduced, read, and engaged with collaboratively. While comics were able to support strategic practices,…

We argue for a course in which students analyze writing about a common topic--in this case World War I--from multiple genres (e.g., poetry and technical manuals). We address the divide between instruction in pragmatic and literary writing and calls to bridge that gap. Students working in disparate areas of English learn the strengths and the…

In this article, Anders Öhman discusses Gert J. J. Biesta's concept of the risk of education and what it could mean for the study of literature in the classroom. The article's point of departure is Bakhtin's theory of the utterance. The utterance, for Bakhtin, has to be embodied, that is, it has to be governed by a purpose: it must be uttered by…

This essay proposes a series of "threshold concepts" for literary studies: "text", "meaning", "context", "form", and "reading". Each term carries both commonsense understandings and disciplinary understandings, which differ from each other drastically. The disciplinary understandings…

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…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the views of prospective teachers of Turkish language and literature on the "text analysis methods" course. In this study, which used the qualitative research approach, the case study design was used. 13 teacher candidates who are enrolled in the Turkish language and literature teaching program…