This essay explores an English lesson I taught to a Year 9 class in which students drew upon and narrativised personal experiences. I describe and examine the literary sociability of the lesson, by which I mean the social and cultural exchanges that give shape to students' reading and writing. In doing so, I demonstrate the need for policymakers…

This article describes a teacher's willingness to perform an autobiographical spoken word poem in his classroom, which provided an important model for students as they composed and shared their own slam-style poems.

William Blake's poetry seeks to inspire readers to participate in the construction of an intellectual community that he calls "Jerusalem." This process remains ever incomplete and is, in a sense, incompletable, for the work of producing such a community involves "continually building & continually decaying"…

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…

How can the best of mathematical problem-based learning be applied toward literature classes? Daniel Sussman, an English teacher at Moorestown Friends School in New Jersey, discusses how he uses problem solving tactics to encourage close, critical reading of fiction texts in his Jewish literature and poetry classes. He explores the challenges of…

This article is a reflective account of my work as a writer-in-residence in 12 post-primary schools, over two academic years. Coming from the perspective of a writer the article fills a gap in the literature, where a substantial body of work exists on the teacher as writer, but little exists on the writer as teacher. The article makes a case for…

Web-based digital video (DV) applications such as Animoto, Magistro, and Videolicious allow users without technical experience to easily create quality video by matching up appropriate images with text and sound. DV's multimedia capabilities encourage students to become more proficient in new literacies as well as new technologies. This piece…

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…

The place of grammar within the teaching of writing has long been contested and successive research studies have indicated no correlation between grammar teaching and writing attainment. However, a recent study has shown a significant positive impact on writing outcomes when the grammar input is intrinsically linked to the demands of the writing…

In this article, the author narrates his lifelong relationship with a major American poet, Walt Whitman. He describes how Whitman's "Song of Myself" and poetic idea influenced his life and way of thinking.

The status of poetry both in the writing curriculum and in wider popular culture is best described as mixed (Wilson, 2009). In spite of a strong post-war tradition of enthusiasm for the teaching of poetry writing, it is currently felt to be marginalised in the writing curriculum (Dymoke, 2007; Ofsted, 2007). This paper reports on the beliefs,…

James Moffett's "Teaching the Universe of Discourse" set out an agenda for the study of development in writing, which influenced James Britton's work in the UK. Subsequently, however, the work of both these thinkers was largely set aside in the approach to writing taken by national strategies in England. In this article, we trace the…

Writing creative nonfiction means perceiving what details are worth telling, why they might matter, and how they might connect. Although no one much likes the term "creative nonfiction" (some are bothered by defining something by what it's not, others by a conviction that the idea is oxymoronic), it has emerged as the name of choice. In the past…

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…

This paper reports on one strand of a research project conducted with prominent writers who are also English teachers from around Australia. It asks what were the conditions which led these writers to come to writing and what conditions have they created in their own work with high school students that establish and promote an enabling pedagogy…