We advocate for the reading of young adult literature (YAL) as a means for justice-oriented education, and we also recognize how the recent surge in challenges to youth-centered texts in the U.S. attempts to limit such work in classrooms. In response, we wondered about the ways in which YAL offers pathways for critically framing and situating…

This study investigates how young elementary children engage with conceptions of gender in connection to video gameplay in the language arts classroom. During a three-week unit on video game literacies in a multiage lab school, children learned about, played, discussed, and wrote about video games. Student writing, game reviews, and literature…

Understanding global perspectives and international cultures is important because of increasing global mobility, digital connections, and national chauvinism. As students engage with diverse others in schools and online, they need global, critical, and ethical understandings of language, literacy, and culture. From a critical cosmopolitan lens,…

On the path towards transformatory approaches to education and empowerment of students and teachers, this study made an attempt to explore literacy and critical literacy (CL) from the perspectives of teachers working in a tertiary institution in Oman. For this research, an exploratory research design with a critical stance was employed. Interviews…

This essay considers the relative merits of critical writing and writing in role as a means of enabling and assessing students' responses to literary texts. Drawing largely on the author's experience of teaching "Frankenstein," it argues that the distinction between critical and creative writing is not as absolute as is sometimes…

HBO's "The Wire" (2002-2008) is often regarded as one of the best television shows ever aired. Through reiterative viewings and a critical content analysis of the show, I argue that "The Wire" should be used as an anchor text in preservice English education courses in order to foster cosmopolitan literacies in preservice…

In this review, we synthesise literature that draws on 'political music' as a curricular and pedagogical tool to support students' critical literacy development. By using contextually relevant, politically oriented songs, teachers can foster critical literacy opportunities for students to cooperatively and collaboratively engage in 'reading',…

If an educator is to take a critical stance, teach students to do the same, and design lessons that engage students in thoughtful discussions and actions surrounding issues of social justice, then discussions of politics, race, culture, economics and systems of power are crucial to this work, and the use of hip-hop is a worthwhile endeavour. In…

In this paper I explore four groups of pre-service teachers' teaching of critical literacy in microteaching to examine how they translated critical literacy into teaching practice for secondary/upper middle grade students (the role played by peers undergoing microteaching). Firstly I discuss some key concepts and outline the pedagogical framework…

Given the multimodal and multicultural character of modern English, English Language Teaching should meaningfully reflect this. Although some attempts have been made, adequate attention has not been paid to reforming writing pedagogy. This paper presents the findings of a two-year research project on writing instruction in the Singapore English…

In this paper, I seek to ascertain whether critical literacy may have an important and realisable place in current English pedagogy, having first tried to establish what is meant by critical literacy, and what its contexts are for my purposes here, including the nature of initial teacher education (ITE). The paper then reports and reflects on some…

This article is located at the crossroads between two distinctive human traits, empathy and rational thought, with narrative emerging as a particularly powerful means to enable young readers to bring them together. Specifically, we discuss the role that critical literary exegesis plays in the development of empathic consciousness in literary…

This article begins by drawing attention to the similarities between the aims of critical literacy within English and Education for Democratic Citizenship (EDC). It then considers subscribing to liberal values in the English classrooms of a plural society and concludes that, as political liberalism is unlikely to be universally endorsed, we need…

It is clear from several government reports and research papers published recently that the curriculum for English in primary and secondary schools is about to change yet again. After years of bureaucratic stranglehold that has left even Ofsted report writers criticising the teaching of English, it seems as if the conditions are right for further…

While we hold that cultural colonization in English teaching in the cross-cultural context is a legitimate concern, we argue that when overstretched it tends to ignore the complex power relations within a culture by imposing homogeneity on it. It may also fossilize the role a foreign language can play in a multilingual context, which, we believe,…