Educators often wonder how to respond purposefully to vexing issues such as ecological sustainability, social justice and holistic health and wellness. The search for useful ways of proceeding can be addressed through engagement in the process of Transformative Inquiry (TI), a mode of inquiry for educators that resonates with indigenous views and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to survey and consider the implications of the literature justifying the value of teaching poetry. There has been a long tradition of literature education in the English departments of Chinese universities. English Poetry courses are offered within optional literature modules in senior stages of a BA in…

Arts Health Antigonish! (AHA!) is a not-for-profit community organization whose mandate is to foster creative expression for community health and well-being (www. artshealthantigonish.org). Over a four-year period, AHA! programs have engaged approximately 20 local artists and over 2,000 community members through poetry, visual arts, dance and…

This qualitative study examined preservice teachers' (PSTs') ideas and beliefs regarding the use of rap for instructional purposes in P-12 classrooms, and the ways in which they proposed to use rap in the teaching of middle and high school social studies. Participants included the instructor of a social studies methods course, and thirteen PSTs…

This article, based on a research project with learners in a township school in South Africa, seeks to discuss whether WhatsApp was able to transform the space of the poetry classroom in positive and productive ways. The project was designed in response to research in EFAL (English First Additional Language) classrooms that revealed the…

The goal of this self-study is to share the process of a first-year, White, middle-class, female teacher adopting a pedagogy and writing curriculum that speaks to the lived realities of her Mexican American students. This paper argues how "testimonio" as curriculum and pedagogy advises critical pedagogy and calls to challenge the present…

Written from the perspective of a Grade 5/6 French Immersion teacher, this paper examines the role of music, poetry, and the visual arts in enhancing learner identity, in the context of the elementary school classroom. It begins with a focus on artistic metaphors that represent cultural and linguistic hyphenation. It then addresses practical…

Poetry is a specific genre of literature that has been long argued as being too difficult for ESL/EFL learners. However, poetry is considered a valuable and authentic material for teaching language learners and teaching poetry in the language classroom can lead to a meaningful language learning experience. This study examined the implementation of…

Education for sustainable development (ESD) persists as an important concept within international policy and yet, despite considerable debate, there remains a lack of consensus as to a pedagogy for ESD in schools. This paper presents findings from a study investigating how an interdisciplinary approach to ESD in England developed one class of 16-…

Interviews in qualitative research may sometimes employ stimulus material as a means of eliciting richer data. However, scant consideration has been given to the use of poetry for this purpose, especially within the field of poetry education research. This article seeks to address the gap in the literature by illustrating how the use of poetry as…

The following experiential-learning innovation for Web 2.0 allows students to engage in creativity that is focused on writing poetry about a course-related topic and then recording a three-minute rap video based on this poetry. The rap video project described in this article offers students an opportunity to apply critical- and creative-thinking…

Teachers routinely report that they feel pressured to teach to standardized assessments. Narrowing the curriculum may help students succeed on standardized assessments, but it rarely leads to long-lasting academic success. Authentic, relevant, and rigorous instruction in newcomer English learner (EL) classrooms, however, can create long-term…

Drawing on sociocultural perspectives, this case study investigated ways that youths write, read, and critique poetry in an online affinity space. Specifically, it used a thematic analysis of interviews, a linguistic analysis of online feedback mechanisms, and poetic analysis to gain insight into how four teens engaged with poetry on the Figment…

Jerome Bruner's experiment over 30 years ago suggested that imaginative literature had greater affordances for the "subjunctification" of experience by those who heard it read aloud than did transactional prose such as a news article. By "subjunctification", Bruner meant the capacity to use the resource (the short story, for…

Evidence suggests that some cognitive processes are based on sensorimotor systems in the brain (embodied cognition). The premise of this is that "Biological brains are first and foremost the control systems for biological bodies". It has therefore been suggested that both online cognition (processing as we move through the world) and…