This article uses excerpts from poetry, memoir and epistolary genres emerging from research that has utilized close writing practices to interpret the interplay among memory, narrative, and agency. Biographical, historical, archival, and interpretive processes are used to reveal deferred, not noticed, and/or not counted experiences of those…

Poetry spaces provide a place where young people can express themselves and develop skills like critical thinking, empathy, and creativity. They empower young people, particularly those at the margins of society. I organized an extracurricular poetry club, Yo Misma, with Latina adolescents in which we read the work of ten Latin American women…

White hegemony is pervasive in and through music education, demanding that teachers and scholars take deliberate social and political actions in order to address racial injustice. Such actions are often built upon propositional knowledge or knowledge that can be evaluated by conceptual reason and verified as true or false (Perry and Shotwell 2009;…

The practice of memorising poems has commonly been perceived as outdated in recent years. By the 1980s, indeed, learning poems by heart frequently headed up a list of old-fashioned pedagogies deemed responsible for turning young people off poetry. Yet it would be hard to overestimate how enormous a gap this opened up with the core assumptions that…

This paper uses a Gwen Harwood poem to open up questions of "knowing" around the teaching of Literature. Following our own brief reading of the poem, we particularly discuss ways in which questions of knowing/knowledge have been considered in Literature teaching historically, such as: - the binary of "knowledge" and…

It is commonly assumed that skills involved in reading poetry, such as decoding and assessing the poem, scanning for details arise in social relations with others, which makes reading social. However, this is social in a weak sense because these new accomplishments result from people working together. Using an alternative theoretical framework…

In this article, Allison Upshaw presents an interdisciplinary arts-based inquiry, an inquiry she undertook as part of the work for her PhD, focused on the instruction she offered her preservice teacher (PST) students in the integration of dance/movement with literacy practices. In this class, the movement was based explorations on the reading of…

This essay seeks to recognise the value in a literature-focused model of the discipline of English, using I.A. Richards, C.K. Ogden and the American New Critics as models of critics who placed the text, and the reader's relationship with the text, at the centre of any study of literature, arguing that this relationship is analogous to that which…

A key instructional goal of English language arts instruction is teaching students to read and interpret complex literary texts. This report reviews the literature on the development and pedagogy of literary analysis skills. It analyzes literary analysis skills as a "key practice," a bundle of disciplinary skills and strategies that form…

Although viewed (and dismissed) by many as primarily a tool for communication, language (and literature) cannot be understood only in relation to "what" it communicates. A study of "how" it is shaped uncovers the social forces that provide its broad and complex template in the acts of reading and writing. This article focuses…

Purpose: This study aims to explore the textual and sociopolitical relationships of kinship writing as 15 youth wrote politically charged poetry while participating in a four-week summer writing program grounded in a Black studies curriculum. Design/methodology/approach: The authors explore the following research questions: How do youth writers…

This essay begins with vignettes showcasing the pedagogy of three teachers of literature in contrastive settings (one in Brazil, two in Australia). These act as prompts for a transnational dialogue between us that unfolds in our writing of this essay. The aim is not to assess or make judgements about the quality of the teaching presented but to…

Although classrooms across the United States continue to become more diverse, teachers are often underprepared to support the learning of immigrant students and students labeled as English learners (ELs). In the current investigation, we turn toward literature discussion using bilingual poetry with teachers to learn how participants recognize…

What better place for young little minds who are full of energy and eager to soak up as much information as possible than a notebook for them to collect their new learning and thoughts? What is it about notebooks that makes writing and learning fun? I wanted to experience the magical feeling that notebooks create with my students--hence, the…

The present paper is supposed to compare and contrast three of these masterpieces written the Renaissance period. The epyllions under study are Christopher Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," Thomas Lodge's "Scylla's Metamorphosis" and Francis Beaumont's "Salmacis and Hermaphroditus." Bush believes that "the influence…