A teacher and author shares vital ways to help students counter climate despair with hope, agency, imagination, and activism.

To combat the inevitable intellectual fatigue that autobiographical essay assignments often engender and, more importantly, to provide students with an authentic audience and purpose for their writing, the author designed an autobiographical assignment that liberates students from the traditional essay format while empowering them to envision…

The author believes that imagination is alive in the high school classroom, but it is pale and sickly, suffering from a long decline in which teachers have confined it to its most decorous forms of expression--inference and interpretation--and become ambiguous about whether or not it is truly welcome. To rouse imagination in the high school…

In this article, the author discusses how she developed an innovative, interdisciplinary unit in eighth-grade English that links with the history teacher's Civil War studies. When constructing lesson plans, the author needed to rely on her sympathetic connection with students. To determine the best way to help students learn, the author had to ask…

Multicultural education and a multicultural curriculum are vital components of contemporary education. While most educators recognize the value of multicultural education in attempting to create a more just world, some lament that they do not have time to incorporate multiculturalism into their classrooms in light of all the content that must be…

One way to merge imagination with problem-posing and problem-solving in the English classroom is by asking students to respond to "cultural and political vignettes" (CPVs). CPVs are cultural and political situations that are presented to students so that they can practice the creative and essential decision-making skills that they will need to use…

In this article, the author discusses how students create their arts projects by responding to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In creating their arts projects, students incorporate film, painting, performance, and other arts in their imaginative and innovative responses to Coleridge's classic work. The author discusses…

Describes techniques for teaching fantasy to junior high school students. (DD)

Encourages English teachers to provide surprises in their teaching and to permit students to have the joy of discovery. (DD)

Examines the works of Hart Crane and suggests his life and works should be studied as a method of helping students learn that the problems they share and endure are common to all men. (RB)

Describes how having students draw both their own and a literary character's reality not only introduces students, quite painlessly and concretely, to a large number of literary terms, but also suggests that literature appreciation demands an imaginative extension into the life of another. (MM)

Inner-city high school teacher Amy Rosoff stresses the importance of play for survival. She offers examples of activities requiring imaginative play from students in classes at all levels from ESL [English as a Second Language] to AP [Advanced Placement]. (Contains 1 figure.)

Argues that the cultivation of the imagination in schools and colleges is largely ignored because of utilitarian biases in the education system, where achievement is determined by quantitative measures of cognitive skills. Discusses Williams' view that acts of the imagination transform reality and applies view to English education. (JG)