The practice of memorising poems has commonly been perceived as outdated in recent years.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…

The widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards in the US has prioritized rigorous reading of complex texts. The emphasis on text complexity has led to instructional and assessment materials that constrain critical literacy practices by emphasizing quantitative features of text, such as sentence length, and a static list of text…

This paper is both a response to the four reviewers in a special symposium on my book Adam Smith's Pluralism and a substantive discussion of philosophy of education. In it, I introduce what I call "the educative critique," a mode of analysis similar to Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial critiques, but focusing on the educative role of a…

Standards for literacy in the twenty-first century raise the bar on the complexity of texts and the tasks for which they are used. The strengths and limitations of contemporary approaches to text complexity are discussed with respect to major points raised in the six articles in this special issue. In addition, four features of text that are of…

In this article, we explore the influence of mathematics graduate students' experiences with the teaching assistantships and texts that they encounter in their programs on their development and identity as teachers. We look to von Foerster's notion of trivial and non-trivial machines to interpret the graduate students' experiences and explain how…

The authors review five major findings in reading comprehension and their implications for educational practice. First, research suggests that comprehension skills are separable from decoding processes and important at early ages, suggesting that comprehension skills should be targeted early, even before the child learns to read. Second, there is…

This paper explores beginning pre-service teaching students' common perceptions of the meaning of the term literacy. The methodology used is described in terms of phenomenographic analyses and the outcome, an array presentation of concepts in diagrammatic form. It establishes that students' conceptions of literacy are embedded predominantly in the…

This paper uses the example of an extra-curricular Graphic Novel Reading Group in order to explore the institutional critical reading practices that take place in English classrooms in the senior years of secondary school. Drawing on Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities, it questions the restrictive interpretive strategies applied to…

Comprehension instruction for students with learning disabilities (LD) is explored from three perspectives, all within the framework of engaging students in meaningful conversations about text with their general education peers. First, excerpts from lesson transcripts are provided to illustrate one special educator's emphasis on student-generated…