This article reports on a small-scale case study involving all English teachers of junior classes in a rural high school in New Zealand. The Head of English had been involved in Writing Project professional learning, designed in accordance with principles and practices that can be found in a number of countries, especially the United States. The…

The early childhood-school relationship is reported as having points of separation and difference. In particular, early childhood teachers located in a school setting report experiencing a push-down effect. This paper reports on a participatory action research project involving three early childhood teachers working within an independent school.…

This article employs an autoethnographic, rhizotextual approach to analyse the compositional processes involved in the construction of two poems by the same author. What the analysis reveals is not only the internal thinking of the author in the process of composition but how the socio-cultural standpoint of the author is implicated in the texts.…

The youth slam poetry movement is growing in Houston. Writers in the Schools (WITS) is helping youth explore their truths through performance poetry and the renowned Meta-Four Houston program. Spoken word, slam competitions, and performance poetry bring people together to share stories and listen to our tomorrows. Performance poetry encourages…

Shakespeare didn't write scripts so much as he wrote plays--live productions to be acted out in front of audiences through multimodal forms of expression. Yet some teachers' script-only approach to the Bard inadvertently isolates students from the many visual, auditory, and performative elements that make his plays so enduring. This article…

This collaborative piece represents one of the first iterations of a methodological possibility called sounded narratives. It is also a performative piece of sound/art, a narrative about a poet and his voice, stories that are as much about himself as they are about curricular possibilities and the power of art. Based on a pair of over two-hour…

Five poetic transcriptions lie at the heart of this article. We intend that they will convey something of what it means and feels like to be an academic researcher in neoliberal universities such that we begin to notice this condition and its effects more acutely. Our poetic texts began their existence as fast-written prose responses to the…

During inquiry investigations with third graders, the authors urge their students not to just make observations but also to record them. Inspired by Joel Fleishman's "A Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices" (1988), the authors developed an activity that increases students' motivation to record accurate and detailed observations. This…

Keri Franklin has proposed that creating the appropriate social-emotional environment for peer response (or peer conferencing, as she calls it) is a necessary first step. Within the context of her peer response process, though, are there strategies that can be adopted that would further scaffold students' ability to take each other's work…

This article considers the influence that assessment exerts on poetry education. By means of research conducted in a post-16 educational context in Malta, it shows that teachers' and students' practices in the poetry lesson are determined by the kind of examinations that candidates sit for. When the mode of assessment is constituted solely by the…

This article shifts from the formal learning spaces of school and university to an Australian public swimming pool to playfully engage some of the dilemmas that recent theory poses for curriculum studies. The article enacts multiple diffractions (Barad, 2007) as theory becomes swimming and swimming becomes theory, and ideas and movements are…

How did colonial linguistic exchanges between Amerindians and Europeans shape early modern conceptualizations of language itself--its locus and limits, its ideological plasticity or inflexibility? While oral traditions are persistent objects of scholarly attention, the concept of orality in itself has often been taken for granted, receiving less…

Despite the growing numbers of migrant students enrolling in Australian secondary schools, and an official acknowledgment of their complex support and learning needs, there has been little policy focus on the pedagogical changes that need to be made by teachers to accommodate these needs. There is also little understanding of the depth and…

Black American Literature is a microcosm of the history of the black people's presence on the American continent as it is known today. The literature of the Black Americans cannot be fully separated from the experience of Slavery and Racism which characterized their lives as a community of people whose social, economic and political privileges are…

It has been created within the larger realm culture, in that "Black methodology differs from most colonial differences by members of a minority community who reside within a nation of cultural biases."