Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates' response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character's body. This paper explores how readers' meaning making was…

Purpose: This paper aims to draw from work in the field of English that questions the "limits of critique" (Felski, 2015) in order to consider the limits of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction. The study focuses on the relational and affective demands that resistant reading places on readers and texts.…

Purpose: This study aims to explore the textual and sociopolitical relationships of kinship writing as 15 youth wrote politically charged poetry while participating in a four-week summer writing program grounded in a Black studies curriculum. Design/methodology/approach: The authors explore the following research questions: How do youth writers…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptualization of reading comprehension that extends beyond the traditional cognitive viewpoint on comprehension common in the field. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on literature and theory from various perspectives (cognitive, sociocultural and critical), the authors propose a conceptual…

Purpose: Affect is central to the process of teaching and learning. The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance against dehumanizing forces that impact students' schooling and life experiences (Dutro, 2019; Leander and Ehret, 2019). This article, taking up the notion of…

Purpose: The purpose of this conceptual paper is to make the case for the value of fostering collaborative sensemaking in responding to literature. Drawing on examples of classroom interactions in 6th-, 8th-, 11th- and 12th-grade classrooms, it proposes methods for teachers to foster collaborative sensemaking. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing…

Purpose: Momentum around the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies in US K-12 classrooms is increasing. Opponents have argued that Ethnic Studies does not challenge students academically and prepare them for high stakes testing (Planas, 2012; Sanchez, 2007). Conversely, research continues to show ways Ethnic Studies contribute to students'…

This paper explores the treatment of London by two authors who are profoundly influenced by the concept of the power of place and the nature of urban space. The works of Peter Ackroyd, whose writings embody, according to Onega (1997, p. 208) "[a] yearning for mythical closure" where London is "a mystic centre of…

Picture books are an important and accessible form of visual art for children because they offer, among other things, opportunities for making connections to personal experiences and to the values and beliefs of families and communities. This paper reports on the use of a picture book to promote Year 4 students' making of text-to-self connections,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on a particular problem that arose in the course of teaching Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" to an MA English class in India. The insistence that Aaron could only be "read" in terms of already available stereotypes created a conflict with the nuanced depiction of Aaron within the…

This paper reports on a project that examined teachers' reading identities and explored ways in which those identities were manifested in reading pedagogy and were adopted by students. The paper focuses on one purposively selected teacher and his class. Tom Ziegler's personal and pedagogical practices were deeply aligned, and his…

This article discusses interconnections between research methodology and English pedagogy in a recent study I undertook. The study was designed to deepen understandings about adolescent reading, using particular English teaching approaches to generate data, mindful that ideas about what constitutes the act of reading are often wide-ranging. I…

In this paper we look at what the critical tradition in education has to offer to the phenomenon of social media. Through an overview and evaluation of the approaches advocated by practitioners of critical literacy and critical media literacy, we illustrate the limitations of applying these frameworks to the fluid and densely interwoven spaces of…

Building on the work developed by Morrell (2003) on critical textual production, this paper provides a glimpse into a critical text produced by a student during a summer research seminar at a West Coast University. This paper highlights the process of critical textual production, the writing that resulted from this method and how a critical…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of the use of children's literature and DVD films on EFL adult language learning. A total of 89 non-English majors enrolled in two Freshman English classes participated in the study. The study employed a quasi-experimental, pretest/posttest comparison group design. The participants in the…