This article explores the pedagogical potential of closely reading and writing hardboiled detective fiction in a Canadian secondary English Language Arts classroom. Grounded in narrative theory and co-taught with a local high-school teacher, the unit focused on the cynical narration and stylistic elements of authors like Raymond Chandler and…

Investigating student voice in the classroom, the author suggests methods for integrating digital texts, both for student research and student writing. He recommends a variety of platforms that support digital storytelling and offers examples of student products and students' reflection on those products.

This paper suggests how the "weird fiction" of H.P. Lovecraft might be mobilised within secondary English classrooms to examine aspects of visual literacy, literary style, narrative form and intertextuality. The approach that is outlined is characterised, after Lovecraft's famous monster, as a "Cthulhuic literacy" and is…

Literary scholars use specific critical lenses called "topoi" (Fahnestock & Secor, 1991) to read literature and write their interpretations of these texts. Literary topoi are used in the discourse of modern college literature classrooms (Wilder, 2002) and are associated with higher grades in students' literature classes (Wilder, 2002, 2005).…

This article will analyze the figurative language that reflects Chinese traditional society and culture in "Yeh-Shen." The authors will consider both the figures of speech and the figures of thought (to include symbolism) that provide insight into an understanding of the Chinese culture through a reading of "Yeh-Shen." This analysis can be used by…

The exploration of poetry as transformative reflects a literary movement attentive to larger struggles over signs and meanings. It is a movement that emphasizes textual play and seeks to alter the social, cultural, and institutional relations in which meanings are generated. Poetry in this sense, then, emphasizes the power of words as a form of…

Genre-based approaches to teaching writing have made important strides in heightening students' awareness of audience and purpose but have paid less attention to the ways in which expectations for written performance in school context are embedded in expectations for certain kinds of discipline-based thinking. In this paper we present a study that…

This paper analyzes the ethically important moments that helped build, then break, and then negotiate the relationship between researchers and schools during an ethnographic-type study conducted by the team of researchers from a prominent private university. I posit that the researchers' unskilled approach culminated in producing written…

This article explicates the Cultural Modeling Framework for designing robust learning environments that leverage everyday knowledge of culturally diverse students to support subject-matter-specific learning. It reports a study of Cultural Modeling in the teaching of response to literature in an urban underachieving high school serving…

According to recent U.S. census reports, while the population of the United States increased by 10%, the population speaking languages other than English at home increased by 38% between 1980 and 1990. One in six of all youth in the United States, ages 14 to 19, either speaks a language other than English at home, was born in a foreign country, or…