What do we see when we observe an excellent English lesson? What's going on in the room? Perhaps what stands out is a collaborative making of meanings inspired by stimulating texts. Perhaps what's most important is an ever-deepening knowledge about, and facility with, the many ways that language works. Maybe what we're seeing is a carefully…

What role might storytelling play both as a component of the English curriculum and as a way of re-envisioning what we do as English teachers? The following story asks questions about storytelling in the English classroom, its fit with current theory and practice, and its role in a contemporary world. Live Bodies is a fiction. None of the…

Steve Shann's latest book is a novel called "The Worlds of Harriet Henderson". It's about 15-year-old Harriet Henderson who has a new English teacher, Molly McInness, and all at once school seems full of possibilities. But, inspired by Molly and impelled by her own adolescent restlessness, Harriet makes an impulsive decision, a decision…

English teachers encourage the view that the imagination helps us understand, and engage with, the world. However, we don't often write fiction as a means of knowing and a way of telling. This short story emerged out of my experience as an English teacher, trying to make sense of the nature of my subject, and out of my reading of others' attempts…

Maxine Greene urges us to look beyond the perspective of the system with its spotlight on data, outcomes and performance goals, and to focus instead on what she calls "the intentionality and concreteness of everyday life". "One must see", she writes, "from the point of view of the participant in the midst of what is…

The language of story and poetry, mythopoetic language, is at the heart of our English discipline. It is language designed to enrich our comprehension of our inner lives, a language that helps us to see beyond the literal, beyond the world revealed to us through other disciplines like science and mathematics, history and geography. In this it…