Getting students talking about a work of literature -- sharing and interrogating their own and each other's textual interpretations and responses -- is vital for the teaching and learning of literature. If a classroom community of readers is constituted by such talking, then responsive teaching involves a lot of "listening." What,…

This discussion article examines the potential integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI), including advanced Large-Language Models like the popular platform ChatGPT into subject English education. Following the significant public and academic attention in response to these technologies through 2023, this paper considers the…

This article interrogates the role of retrieval practices in an urban, multicultural London classroom. With the advent of cognitive science-based approaches in recent years, retrieval has become a central tenet for testing foundational knowledge in English literature. I consider the implications of retrieval for classroom discourses concerning…

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…

This is a review essay of Joseph North's "Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History." I interrogate many of North's claims, most notably his argument about the way a shift from literary criticism to literary scholarship has blunted the capacity of people working in literary studies to engage in a socially critical praxis. I use his…

English teachers select texts for the edifying qualities they possess: a good poem, novel or film can act both as a window looking out over different lives and as a powerful mirror for reflection. When teachers reflect on their professional practice, however, they generally look to education theory, to research or to action learning strategies.…

Leveraging the aesthetic turn in hip-hop scholarship, this article examines how some of the goal-directed and compositional techniques of DJs can be used to redesign and remix African American literature courses. Specifically, we focus on drops and blends, two moves evident among DJs and turntablists in hip-hop culture. Anchoring our analysis to…

This paper examines contestations over the value of Literature in the secondary school curriculum in the former British colony of Singapore and the way the Literature curriculum has been framed to understand the various issues surrounding the role of Literature education. Using Raymond Williams' framework of dominant, residual and emergent…

This paper explores the processes behind drawing different kinds of inference from a single short film. It examines the range knowledge that groups of viewers are able to derive from listening to film sound, and from summarizing the work of a whole film, using the concepts of "aesthetic" and "efferent" reading set out by Louise…

This article explores the attraction of Canadian elementary teachers to children's stories that narrate trauma, particularly the trauma associated with First Nations peoples' experiences in Canadian residential schools as told by Indigenous authors. The teachers' responses to these texts are conceived of as occurring within a "contact…

This article reviews and discusses how metaphor as a trope has been regarded as an essential element in rhetorical approaches to reading and to writing. In addition it considers the extent to which, while metaphor-making is a fundamental cognitive capacity, a metaphorizing habit of mind may be especially pertinent to some aspects of aesthetic…

Rosenblatt's transactional theory and Pike's aesthetic model of reading both put the reader at the heart of the reading transaction. A re-envisionment of these approaches in terms of the pragmatist reader, a concept derived from Norbert Wiley's "pragmatism's self" and the findings of a recent case study into classroom reading, leads to a…