"Ulysses" by James Joyce (1882-1941) has a surprising amount of 19th-century, classical physics. The physics community is familiar with the name James Joyce mainly through the word "quark" (onomatopoeic for the sound of a duck or seagull), which Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019 -- Physics Nobel Prize 1969) sourced from Joyce's…

Teacher-researcher, Katherine Macro spent six weeks observing an eleventh-grade Advanced Placement and Composition class at Sunnybrooke Central High School to examine the teacher's use of creative drama to teach Shakespeare. In this article, Macro describes ways the instructor used theater-based instructional strategies, especially a staged…

In this article, the authors use the O. Henry story Transients in Arcadia to illustrate how readers can make a text more meaningful by connecting it to themselves, to other texts, and to the world. Transients in Arcadia is a celebrated ironic commentary about the desire of everyday men and women to experience wealth. The authors have leveraged…

Student enjoyment is important when creating any unit, but teachers should also consider if an activity will enhance learning. In addition to being enjoyable, drama-based activities enrich learning by disrupting passivity, encouraging participation, and enhancing comprehension. This article showcases ways to include these activities in a unit…

As a relatively common tool and object of analysis in teaching Shakespeare and dramatic literature in general, live performance deserves further attention within the pedagogical literature. This is even more true now, since the development of digitally relayed live broadcasts has widened access to theatre, creating greater possibilities for…

The English classroom is an indispensable site to critically engage the social complexity of the climate crisis and COVID-19. A question comes up, however, about how to plan for such critical engagement when teaching canonical literature that is seemingly removed from the specific concerns of the current moment. The focus of this article is on…

The benefits of performance-based classroom approaches to teaching Shakespeare have been well-documented in pedagogical scholarship. This paper is an effort to push beyond the performance-based classroom and begin to incorporate ideas from the field of performance studies into a new pedagogical approach that capitalizes on my institution's…

Over the past decade, local live productions of Shakespeare have become increasingly visible to scholars and audiences alike, both through critical work on the subject as well as through public projects such as Shakespeare on the Road. This visibility highlights the cultural and artistic work of regional theatre. On the one hand, local live…

This short story illustrates an occasion of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogical practices in relation to the canonical texts which are often used in urban classrooms. In it, a lesson on Jane Eyre's childhood point of view and mode of introspectiveness delves into a tale of dancing and Otherness. The story shows that in spaces where…

At the Philadelphia-area manufacturer GGBearings, employees representing every corner of the plant--from the company president to machinists, engineers, and finance staff members--have assembled in the conference room. The balanced mix of men and women varies in age, race, and background. Some are in uniform, others in business-casual dress. A few…

Three academics reflect on how to stay positive during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sarah Higginbotham finds that some of her most heartening experiences during this time have been while enacting unrehearsed Zoom Shakespeare plays with colleagues and students. She usually experiences telepresence events as rather flattened interactions, while insulated…

This essay draws out the useful parallels between the best kind of teacher and the Good Witch of the North, Glinda, from "The Wizard of Oz." Unappealing to many viewers or readers of the classic children's story, Glinda offers an inspiring reminder of four important pedagogical points: (1) the master teacher always treats her student as…

A conversation between scholars demonstrates how two experts found common ground and made classroom recommendations while wrestling through an underlying question: Who cares about "The Grapes of Wrath?"

Historical fiction has long been a staple in the social studies, history, and English curricula of primary and secondary education. Such commercial and critical successes might be linked to the genre's unique ability to blend educational, didactic, historical, and aesthetic concerns in children's literature, aspects that are heightened…

The author pushes two desks together in the front of the class and pile supplies on them: markers, drawing paper, rulers, and pencils. As the students enter a combined English language arts (ELA) and English as a New Language (ENL) tenth-grade classroom, they select what they need and settle in to their work. As an ELA educator who is also a…