Critical approaches to literature in secondary English require greater attention to narrative discourse. In this conceptual article, I provide interpretative tools from contemporary narratology and demonstrate their critical potential for high school English. In particular, I outline critical literacy's vital but overattentive focus on the…

Selecting and remembering the necessary information from rapidly increasing information requires summarization skills. Research on improving students' summarization skills has focused on deletion, generalization, and reconstruction strategies. However, direct teaching of these strategies does not yield successful results. For this reason,…

This article explores the potential of narrative interest for secondary literature education. Narrative is a purposeful construction which is organised with the intent of having effects on readers. For rhetorical narratologists, narrative is driven by the production of narrative gaps -- suspense, curiosity, and surprise -- which in turn drive…

White hegemony is pervasive in and through music education, demanding that teachers and scholars take deliberate social and political actions in order to address racial injustice. Such actions are often built upon propositional knowledge or knowledge that can be evaluated by conceptual reason and verified as true or false (Perry and Shotwell 2009;…

This article explores the potential for engaging 7 and 8-year-old school pupils in performative literature interpretation through process drama. Inspired by new materialism and affect theory, we focus on how literature interpretations come into being in dramatic fiction, and on how these becoming interpretations merge with the classroom. The study…

Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative's plot or an expository text's description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to…

Howard, Overstreet, and Ticknor build on the framework they established in their first book "It's Not 'One More Thing'." They extend their practical how-to strategies for enacting culturally responsive and affirming literacy instruction in K-12 classrooms specific to literacy assessment, engaging texts used for literacy instruction, and…

Recent scholarship in multiliteracies-oriented pedagogies has advocated for greater attention to fostering 'textual thinking', understood as forms of literacy that consider the complexities of semiotic choices made by authors, and their underlying meanings, rhetorical purposes, and cultural contexts. This kind of engagement with texts calls upon…

Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…