This article presents the work of two female students in a rural school who were assigned to respond to a Shakespearean text with a Digital Video (DV) project. The study shows how the teacher provided students appropriate time, mediation, and space in allowing them to bring their out-of-school literacies and interests within an academic context.…

To prepare student teachers for the diversity they will face in schools, they have to develop intercultural competence. This paper analyses an assignment in teacher education, where the purpose is to impart this competence to student teachers. Student teachers read and reflected on a novel related to a multicultural context, and we examined in…

Rooted in examples from their own and others' classrooms, the authors offer discipline-specific practices for implementing antiracist literature instruction in White-dominant schools. Each chapter explores a key dimension of antiracist literature teaching and learning, including designing literature-based units that emphasize racial literacy,…

The French film "Entre Les Murs" ("The Class") is a somewhat unusual film in its portrayal of a Parisian working class school and its protagonist, Mr. Marin, who attempts to teach an unruly class of young and very diverse teenagers. This article explores the ways the author used the film "The Class" as a culminating…

The author spent significant time over the past year developing a course that would examine sports themes and analyze the literary techniques authors, directors, and others employ when converting this seemingly facile facet of contemporary life into art. He worked his way through what are at times perfunctory preparatory tasks with an uncommon…

Drawing from the importance of narrative inquiry in contemporary geographical reasoning and teaching, this paper focuses on some practices set around the relationship between maps and literature. Reader-generated maps, maps produced starting from the reading of a literary text, are at the core of a reflection on the potentialities of literary…

It is not clear that the literary genre called poetry has a future in the face of a reduction in literary study that Common Core's English language arts standards implicitly mandate-- and in the context of Common Core's drive for workforce development. Common Core claims the standards will prepare students equally for "college and…

The comparative effectiveness of graphic novels, heavily illustrated novels, and traditional novels as reading teaching tools has been sparsely researched. During the 2011-2012 school year, 24 mixed-ability fifth grade students chose to read six novels: two traditional novels, two highly illustrated novels and two graphic novels. Students…

High school teacher Cara M. Arver walks teachers through her experience of setting up a virtual world to augment students' reading of "Lord of the Flies." Students interact as additional characters, discuss and solve problems based on the circumstances of the story, and complete classroom assignments within a virtual environment.

A mock-heroic poem as a writing assignment, after a study of Pope. One student's response is included. (AA)

A cultural component has been used in one instructor's literature classes at Georgia Perimeter College as a response to Expected Educational Outcome 4 which states: "The students will be exposed to and/or participate in cultural activities, events, and presentations," and to General Education Outcome 3 which states: "The students…

Describes an approach to paper assignments in a literature course designed to present sufficient options in essay topics to allow the individual student to develop new skills while working at his/her own level of advancement. (HOD)

Describes an assignment in which students wrote letters to the editor of the "English Journal" in response to Edna Bogert's article, "Censorship and 'The Lottery.'"

Reports on a "summing up" assignment at the end of a course on the fiction of J. D. Salinger. Notes the way students used parodies to display their knowledge of Salinger's style and recurrent themes. Offers one student-written parody as an example. (RL)

Provides job cards for language activities in the middle grade classroom which pick up on ideas from "The Phantom Tollbooth," a children's classic by Norton Juster. (DD)