The mysterious and unspoken secrets of life can be a source of fascination for young people. The bildungsroman quest for identity is often coupled with a protagonist's attempts to decode a range of secrets. Jamaica Kincaid's work of fiction, "Annie John" (1985), illustrates this journey. In this novel, the female protagonist's maturity…

The study unveils the Afghan patriarchal ideology and norms that are in conflict and challenge with liberal feminist ideology in Khaled Hosseini's (2013) "And the Mountains Echoed," depicting the cultural and socio-political context of Afghanistan. Tools of critical stylistics, developed by Jefferies (2010), have been used to delve into…

This paper reads the U.K. Government's "fundamental British values" project alongside two children's Gothic novels, "Coram Boy" (2000) by Jamila Gavin and "City of Ghosts" (2009) by Bali Rai. In 2011 the U.K. Government outlined what it described as "fundamental British values" (FBV), making it a requirement…

This article attempts to show an adolescent boy's continuing process of self-realisation through his disillusionment with the bleak reality of Dublin in the early twentieth century in the short story "Araby" by James Joyce. Brought up in the drab and deadening surroundings with his uncle and aunt in conservative Catholic cultures, the…

Asked to recommend a faculty reading that might counteract our habits of overspecialization, I nominate Amitav Ghosh's "Sea of Poppies" (2008), the first novel in his "Ibis" trilogy. Reading Ghosh has offered me not only a fascinating introduction to the Indian Ocean world but also an occasion to reflect upon the dynamics of a…

Patrick Slattery is a professor of Curriculum Development and Philosophy of Education at Texas A&M University. He holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Teaching, Learning, & Culture and Educational Administration & Human Resource Development. He is a former president of the Arts-Based Educational Research Association, an…

When teachers work with students to construct a metalanguage that they can draw on to describe and analyze graphic novels, and then invite students to apply that metalanguage in the service of composing multimodal texts of their own, teachers broaden students' analytical frameworks. In the process of doing so, teachers empower students. In this…

"Bhimayana" is a graphic novel that narrates Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's experiences of being discriminated against. Using a graphic form inspired by Pardhan Gond art, "Bhimayana" breaks popular conventions of graphic narratives published in the West. The narrative of "Bhimayana" is interlaced with contemporary events and…

In September 2011 in Rome at the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research conference, Eugene Matusov (USA), Kiyotaka Miyazaki (Japan), Jayne White (New Zealand), and Olga Dysthe (Norway) organized a symposium on Dialogic Pedagogy. Formally during the symposium and informally after the symposium several heated discussions started…

As the newspaper continues to lose ground to a multitude of internet discourses, the role of intellectuals as a voice of opposition to hegemonic sources receives ever more intense scrutiny. In particular, the novel "Plata quemada" (1997) by the Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia presents this intellectual dilemma and its newfound…

This article states that the concept of time we generally hold is a spatial version of time. However, a spatial time concept creates a series of problems, with unfortunate consequences for education.The problems become particularly obvious when the spatial time concept is used as a basis for the education function that is connected to the…

As president of the California Council on Teacher Education from 1994-1996, teacher educator Grace Grant reflects on the first conference she attended of the then California Council on the Education of Teachers in 1976 at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. The keynote speaker was Gary Fenstermacher, the then-director of teacher…

This article presents an interview with Paolo Bacigalupi, a rising sci-fi star who has walked away with the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and, most recently, the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature--the Young Adult Library Services Association's top prize for prose. That's pretty impressive for a guy who's published…

Scholars Kali Tal and Cathy Caruth express the importance of trauma literature as "the need to tell and retell the story of the traumatic experience, to make it "real" both to the victim and to the community," and to tell "a reality or truth that is not otherwise available." In "Solar Storms" Linda Hogan vividly recounts the consequences of…

Mary Mobley teaches English and Michael Chambers teaches world history at Manor New Technology High School, a STEM school, in Manor, Texas. In this article, they talk about how they used "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins to teach their students about forms of government between World War I and World War II, and "Edutopia"…