The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has created tools and supports intended to help teachers adapt to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics. The tools seek to find the right balance between encouraging teachers' creativity and giving them enough guidance to ensure quality. They are the product of two years of…

Rather than propose or endorse a single theory of comedy, this essay explores a wide variety of implications in sometimes-conflicting ideas on the subject. It groups questions under such topics as types of comedy, plot, social morality, and identity. These questions are drawn from a wide range of viewpoints both ancient and modern. It concludes…

In contemporary contexts, young people are accustomed to life story; indeed, their lives are saturated with constructions of their stories and those of others, whether created by themselves or their "friends" on social networks. Multimedia outlets convey often detailed stories of more-famous others, whether celebrities or those experiencing…

Universities and students collaborate in a shared language of excellence, quality and choice, and become part of the same discourse of marketisation, commodification and globalisation, where each plays their part as provider and consumer in a highly competitive international area. Whilst there are an increasing number of studies which focus on the…

In the author's effort to find out more about how "English Journal" articles have led to meaningful changes, he asked several teachers to write about "an "English Journal" article that made a difference." Several council members write about influential articles they read in the pages of NCTE's century-old journal. The brief stories they tell…

Secondary career and technical education (CTE) students are faced with the unique challenge of learning not only specific content-related knowledge and skills, but also postsecondary preparation, 21st century technology, employability and self-marketing skills. At Cass Career Center in Harrisonville, Missouri, a senior capstone project was…

Creating specific lessons for different language skills is challenging and time consuming for English teachers, but it is definitely worth the effort. In the author's experience, teaching language skills through mechanical exercises and traditional fill-in-the-blank, true/false, and multiple-choice assessments does not interest students as much as…

This article uses the analytic lens of power relations and models of power to examine how the participation of two students in an urban US eighth-grade English language arts class was symbolically and literally deleted. The researcher asks why do some students fail despite being placed in a technologically rich educational environment that…

The following narrative reflects on the dilemmas and problems faced by inexperienced researchers working within the field of education. Focusing on a research project completed in fulfilment of an MA in Teaching and Learning, the article recounts the decisions made by one emergent researcher and evaluates how far the chosen methods may have helped…

While "transfer" has become, in recent years, a subject of great research interest to our field, we still have much to learn about how we can best use this research knowledge to inform local efforts in program development. In this profile, we describe the foundations of the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and explain how…

Widely thought to be something worth encouraging in young learners, creativity has popularly been associated more with music and art than with other areas of the curriculum. There have been many studies of creativity but few that focus explicitly on what counts as creative thinking in specific subject areas. The aim of the research reported here…

This article explores the affordances and risks of practicing friendship and mentorship as methodological approaches in two qualitative studies: (a) the mentor's study in a diverse 9th grade classroom and (b) the protege's subsequent study of teacher professional development in the same school. Friendship methodology, as theorized by Tillmann and…

The texts and classroom activities in this paper are a sample of those used within a unit on "The Battle for Survival". The unit brings classic Australian literary texts together with reportage on contemporary news events, and demonstrates an integrated approaches to the Literacy, Language and Literature strands of the AC:E. The unit…

This study is an examination of the state of the liberal arts curriculum in community colleges in three geographic regions of the United States. From a constructivist paradigm and using globalization theory as a theoretical framework, this multiple case study examined faculty work life and administrative processes related to curriculum change in…

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…