Helping students recognize the value of humanistic inquiry can be challenging, especially in required courses. This essay presents a solution: an assignment in which students were asked to pitch one of the required readings to Netflix for adaptation. Through close readings of student responses and an analysis of the "so what" component…

In this classroom study, the authors examine the use of popular psychology myths as a frame for literary analysis in high school English. The study reflects a cultural studies approach to teaching that attends to students' cultural awareness in interpreting what they read. Previous research has demonstrated that students' cultural awareness, in…

Over the course of history, various groups have challenged, banned, and burned texts out of fear and the desire to control the thoughts and beliefs of a populace. Dictatorial regimes such as Hitler's Nazi-controlled Germany used "bonfires [to] 'cleanse' the German spirit of the 'un-German' influence of communist, pacifist, and, above all,…

This article examines the practice of studying texts in secondary school English lessons as a particular type of reading experience. Through a critical stylistic analysis of a popular edition of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men", the article explores how reading the text is framed by educational editions, and how this might present the…

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,"…

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…

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

The use of service learning in university courses can be limited depending on the class and the subject matter. In this article, the authors provide examples of two teachers' experiences with service learning in literature courses, showing service learning can have a home in fields of study where it might not initially seem to belong. The authors…

This paper suggests how the "weird fiction" of H.P. Lovecraft might be mobilised within secondary English classrooms to examine aspects of visual literacy, literary style, narrative form and intertextuality. The approach that is outlined is characterised, after Lovecraft's famous monster, as a "Cthulhuic literacy" and is…

This article is based on part of a case study looking into how sixth form students search for goal related information online for an open-ended task. Qualitative data was gathered through think-aloud protocols; analysis was informed by Afflerbach and Cho's (2009) Hypertext reading strategies. From the perspective of multiple documents literacy and…

In this essay, we explore how the same theories and metaphors' used historically to describe the frontier, are useful ways of thinking about both team teaching and English studies as an interdisciplinary field. Defining the frontier as both imprecise and liminal encourages the students, as well as the instructors, to work within an open space of…

This article examines how the use of multimedia sources can deepen student engagement, comprehension, and questioning of a variety of texts. Through an American literature project, "The Art of War", high school juniors work in collaboration to read, analyze, and create original digital texts using Animoto.com. As a result, educators are able to…

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…

2009 is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Naturally, historians are thrilled. But what about their discipline? Why and how might Lincoln matter to English studies? In this article, the authors reflect on Lincoln and his influence on English studies. They argue that Lincoln has played or can play an important role in the college English…