How might historians of education bring joy to their work and make our scholarship of use to the world? This article suggests returning to Welland Hendrick's 1909 "A Joysome History of Education." This minor but well-circulated text uses humour and irony to poke fun at some of the more obtuse, sacrosanct, and self-righteous aspects of…

This paper examines literacy as a sociocultural, personal and human practice dependent on and derived through relationships between people, settings and culture. Drawing on a recent empirical research study that combines learner, teacher and author perspectives [Curtin (2023) "Reading and Writing Pathways Through Children's and Young Adult…

This paper reports on a short project undertaken with student English teachers during their one year Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) teaching course that considered the potential inclusion of the novella "The Woman of Colour" into their teaching. The research considers how the student teachers received the text and the…

The underrepresentation of women and girls in children's picture books and the use of gender stereotypes persists, as seen in a sample of 335 books published between 2010 and 2020. Previous research showed a significant lack of female representation in children's picture books and stereotyped presentation. A pilot study was conducted to establish…

Recent scholarship in multiliteracies-oriented pedagogies has advocated for greater attention to fostering 'textual thinking', understood as forms of literacy that consider the complexities of semiotic choices made by authors, and their underlying meanings, rhetorical purposes, and cultural contexts. This kind of engagement with texts calls upon…