Given the persistence of anti-Blackness, the author demonstrates what can happen when Blackness takes precedence over anti-Blackness in an 11th-grade English classroom. This study uses critical autoethnography to explore a collaborative approach to teaching and learning that sustains Blackness. The author uses storying to amplify the significance…

Facilitating dialogic discussions in English classrooms is a key component of fostering student learning and working toward educational equity. Orchestrating high quality text-based discussions requires attending to the unique situations that arise when particular students grapple with complex ideas in rich texts. It also requires making quick and…

In this article, the authors examine how social media memes can manipulate and polarize audiences and provide teaching approaches for student learning, understanding, and action. The authors describe the four-step instructional approach they use to guide preservice English language arts (ELA) teachers and their secondary students in recognizing…

This article takes a personal view of the contribution made by Pete Medway to King's College London.

Studies of the way games and gaming align themselves with the pedagogy of the humanities have left behind a key discipline: that of literary studies, as opposed to literacy studies, a far more common concern among scholars who have examined the impact of games on university and secondary teaching. This paper considers the reasons for such a lacuna…

This article provides a reflective commentary on the modification of the lead author's professional practice in a secondary academy in England. The modification of practice has been as a result of work conducted on a postgraduate Masters module, which has focused on practitioner development of an exemplar grammar lesson devised for Year Nine…

In the fields of Corpus Linguistics and Teacher Education, there is a substantial body of research relating to corpus applications in the classroom. However, the majority of such work relates to teacher training in tertiary education. In this article, a research project is described in which corpus training was included as part of a Certificate in…

This article examines the practice of studying texts in secondary school English lessons as a particular type of reading experience. Through a critical stylistic analysis of a popular edition of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men", the article explores how reading the text is framed by educational editions, and how this might present the…

This paper presents an analysis of the gender of the authors and the main characters of the set texts for English examinations taken at age 16 in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It presents an argument for why representation within the canon is important and places this within the context of recent educational reform in England and…

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…

As the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts (ELA)/literacy and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) highlight connections across subject areas, convergences and discrepancies come into view. As a prominent example, this article focuses on how the CCSS and the NGSS treat "argument," especially in Grades…

The Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts were a part of a reformation of the nation's reading standards. The demands for higher standards were due to the general public and Federal legislators request for higher student achievement. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore the teachers' life experiences, thoughts,…

The idea of writing to the next generation about one's struggles to overcome poverty, discrimination, and repression dates back more than 200 years in American history and offers many perspectives on the American experience. Focusing on the literal and psychological journey to freedom in Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,"…

Place-based pedagogy, the incorporation of local dynamics into the classroom as a step toward bridging the school-community gap, is becoming increasingly popular as educating for sustainability gains traction in schools. However, little attention has been paid to the role Appalachia has played in creating our modern sense of place-based pedagogy…

In this article, the author uses lesson reflection as a way to consider ethical issues that accompany teaching with texts that include death. More specifically, the article examines the relationship between moral education and analytic or skills-based education.