This article discusses classroom conditions that support the co-creation of dialogic space--where our different ideas and perspectives are in conversation with others such that we might take in what other people are saying and be open to it affecting our thinking. Drawing on ethnographic case study data, we provide context to illustrate ways this…

This study investigates the interpretive approaches of three English teachers working in different grade levels with the same poem, Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer." The researcher sought to learn what the teachers identified as most valuable about studying poetry in school, what interpretive approaches they employed…

This study takes a fine-grained look at the inaugural implementation of a high-stakes teacher performance assessment (the edTPA) from multiple perspectives and chronicles how participants used the reading, writing, and discussion of poetry to cope with and sometimes critique the edTPA. Teacher researchers sought to understand multiple perspectives…

As a college literature teacher, the goal of the author is to enable students to create their own meaning from their encounter with a text, respecting the text's sources, limits, contexts, and possibilities as well as their own. Fostering this creative response is among the greatest challenges and rewards of the profession. While teaching EN102:…

This essay tells the story of a collaboration between an English education professor in a large urban university and a high school English teacher working in a school whose population consists almost entirely of new immigrants. The English education professor serves as a visiting teaching artist, introducing the students to studies of works of…

Writing about the teaching artist practice should mean writing about art making. As both teacher and artist, the authors are required to be cognizant of their own art-making processes, both how it works and why it is important to them, in order to make this process visible to their students. They also need the same skills to write about how and…

A case study illustrates how art therapy was used to elicit the narrative of an adolescent male student in transition from incarceration to a transfer school setting. Childhood trauma was addressed in individual sessions and within a literacy group co-led by a reading specialist. The art therapist responded to the client's needs by broadening the…

The Global Writes (GW) model is a well-designed performing arts integrated literacy program that builds local and global support among students, teachers, and arts partners through the use of innovative technologies. Through local partnerships between schools and arts organizations forged by GW, classroom teachers and local teaching artists build…

As a collaborative program bringing the instructional resources of Wesleyan University to the maximum security Cheshire Correctional Institute in Connecticut enters its second semester, prison and higher education experts are seeing decreasing support for similar programs across the U.S. According to some experts, state funding on prison education…

As Richardson reminds us, "People make sense of their lives, for the most part, in terms of specific events." The author develops a set of poems based on his autoethnography study on Children of Alcoholics (COA). As the author reads Paulo Freire through alcoholism discourse, he creates a link between COA and his own school experiences.…

How might songs, like John Lennon's "Imagine" or Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the wind", offer ways to explore alternative ways of being in the world, to challenge the status quo? How might these songs become springboards for original pieces that capture students' ideas about world issues? In this article, I observe what happens…

This article places youth spoken word (YSW) poetry programming within the larger framework of arts education. Drawing primarily on transcripts of interviews with teen poets and adult teaching artists and program administrators, the article identifies specific benefits that participants ascribe to youth spoken word, including the development of…

It is important to find the means by which struggling writers can find success in the English Language Arts. For students struggling with reading and writing, the visual arts may be a way of accessing and expressing their ideas and ultimately opening up a world of creative possibilities. This article explores drawing and painting as a pre-writing…

This article profiles Christopher Benfey, 53--an art critic for Slate, a poet, and a prolific literary essayist for such venues as "The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic," and "The New York Review of Books." His latest book, "A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily…

Drawing connections between Chaucer, Eminem, and social issues, New York City high school teacher Tom Liam Lynch helped students become familiar with "The Canterbury Tales." Students wrote poems of rhymed couplets about today's social and political issues, created illuminated manuscripts, and recorded a rap CD. A book and album were…