Teacher lack of knowledge outside British and American literature is a major obstacle in teaching World Literature. This article offers the experiences of three teachers teaching the Bhagavad Gita and suggests ways to overcome lack of teacher knowledge when reading cross-culturally.

The idea of writing to the next generation about one's struggles to overcome poverty, discrimination, and repression dates back more than 200 years in American history and offers many perspectives on the American experience. Focusing on the literal and psychological journey to freedom in Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,"…

At the risk of painting with too broad a brush, it is a rare thing in education scholarship to speak directly to the problem of whiteness. As one of the primary conduits for racial stratification in society, the structure of schooling provides heavy doses of racialized harm, but much of this harm is obscured through the race-blind, well-worn…

In the urban high school where the author was teaching, grade 11 AP Literature classes were studying Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" through literature circles. She had noticed that students undertook the role of Illustrator with immense effort, purpose, and creativity. Moreover, the group discussions surrounding the Illustrator's visual…

The United States is an increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse nation. English teachers play an important role in prompting students to engage in democratic dialogue about equity in response to visual messages that circulate historic and present- day racism and other derogatory messages about class, gender, sexual orientation, and…

According to the author, as our abilities to combine image and text become more sophisticated and ubiquitous, digital storytelling is a powerful means for sharing those stories. Digital storytelling is a perfect way to remix stories. To present American literature as relevant to students' lives, the author rewrote their curriculum using backwards…

While working on her master's degree, the author signed up for a summer course that was vaguely titled Teaching Strategies for Secondary School. As it turned out, the professor had significant leeway in deciding what to teach in this one-week course, and he decided to team up with a political science professor to focus on democracy in education.…

The author describes the complex process one teacher goes through to create meaningful formative and summative assessments to define and support student learning.

The implementation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) across the country necessitates revising the English curriculum, asking teachers to incorporate and analyze more perspectives in the classroom as society becomes more diverse. The authors wondered if this reform might provide an opportunity to examine social equity by studying an anchor…

English teachers continually seek ways to offer students quality texts to support the development of individual voices within the context of a dynamic, democratic culture. This article discusses how blog use, promoting choices, and presenting students with literature that changed a nation show them how to find their voices in a democratic…

Curious about the connections between the author's students' reading tastes and those of 19th-century readers, the author read Nina Baym's excellent text "Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America" to gain a sense of how readers in the 1800s might have thought about the texts that they read. Nineteenth-century…

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he should know, what he shall do." As teachers of American Literature, the authors admire Emerson's faith in the individual and find Thoreau's resistance to conformity an act of daring bravery,…

"Middlesex" is a book about undiagnosed hermaphrodite coming to terms with his/her socially determined sexuality and his/her choice of sexuality. The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Calliope Stephanides, is raised as a girl because he/she presented feminine genitalia at birth. When Calliope realizes he/she is a hermaphrodite--a realization…

High school teacher J. Arias employs a research method from anthropology to motivate students to research and write. Learning to use the methods and perspectives of ethnography, students become critical viewers and thinkers, able to connect the themes of literary works to their lives and to critique the variety of texts that surround them. Arias…

Barbara Bennett explains the tenets behind ecofeminism and why it is a useful and appropriate method of literary analysis for today's world. By applying the theory to Le Guin's story, she helps her students relate the issues of ecofeminism to their American lifestyle.