As colleges and universities--particularly predominantly White institutions (PWIs)--look to offer healing and reconciliation for racialized transgressions, it is important that these institutions also honor the sacrifices of those brave students who not only broke barriers but also held open the door of opportunity through which others may walk.…

As a teacher educator of literature methodology in Mauritius, this arts-based self-study is rooted in the need to improve my professional practice. It emanated from a critical incident during the COVID pandemic when I used blackout poetry during an online synchronous session with in-service teachers for a Postgraduate Certificate in Education. The…

Over the course of 18 months, I found myself on a journey that began with two research questions based on my wonderings and observations about the lives of the women I witnessed engaging with young Black children in ways that the academic literature had not expounded upon. In this article, I use poetic inquiry to elucidate the liberatory practices…

This pretest/posttest nonequivalent groups study explored the relationship between classroom-based creative writing instruction and the figurative language abilities of fourth grade students. Figurative language is widespread within the oral and written discourse of K-12 classrooms and is an essential component of higher-level language and…

Background: Poetry predates all other genres of literature, and it has been argued that the relationship between poetry and language is inextricable. The ability of African people to articulate their own stories was largely silenced by colonialism. Poems and lyrics have been known to create a bridge between individuals in meaningful words and…

In 2023, only 1 in 3 children and young people said that they enjoyed writing in their free time. This report highlights the role of our Young Writers Programme in encouraging writing for enjoyment. Through memorable experiences, working with professional writers and by providing a real purpose and audience, Young Writers inspires children and…

While memorization has been criticized as outdated, recent studies have suggested that memorized poetry constitutes a vital repository which enhances the quality of individuals' lives. The pedagogical potential of learning poetry by heart, however, has hardly been explored in contemporary settings. This qualitative study focuses on the experiences…

Background music with lyrics can be a prevalent distraction in environments where people study or read while music plays. However, such effects on reading comprehension across different language contexts remain insufficiently investigated. Guided by the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction and the semantic-interference hypothesis, the…

This article explores how college instructors can use William Blake's unique pairing of image and text -- what W.J.T. Mitchell calls "composite art" -- to encourage students to think and write about the dynamic interplay of image and text in modern communications. Opening with an anecdote of teaching Songs of Innocence and of Experience…

The COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and political and social movements have required each of us to pause. Collectively they signal a unique moment in our history, and we argue that they provide us with an opportunity to consider what matters most as we move forward. Using poetic representation and Brené Brown's guideposts for wholehearted…

This article presents one of the actions of the project titled "Re-inhabiting the Neighborhood: Transformation Processes of Empowerment among University-School-Society through Artistic Practices." Its aim was to introduce haiku poetry in terms of its potential for vocal exploration through collective musical interpretation. Four…

Although growing numbers of children engage in transnational literacy practices in their homes and communities, these practices are rarely invited into the early literacy classroom, where teachers face increasing pressure to standardize instruction. In this qualitative, participatory case study, we examined how one early literacy teacher created…

Creating psychologically safe spaces for pre-service teachers to talk about their hopes, dreams and tensions of becoming teachers is complex work that requires teacher educators to engage with a range of pedagogical practices. A teacher educator must consider how they create this safe space, offering opportunity for vulnerabilities to be revealed.…

Situated within a series of river journeys, this inquiry considers the role of material landscape in shaping learning possibilities and explores practices of reading landscapes diffractively. We consider ways we might pay attention to the ever-changing flux of places while experimenting with posthuman pedagogical praxis. Methodologically, we…

This article contributes to an emerging body of scholarship on multimodal composition in the poetry classroom through a study of Finnish lower secondary students' digital videomaking in response to poetry. The study explores students' use of semiotic resources in their interpretive work in transmediating a poem into a digital video, with a…