Incorporating the arts into the classroom through the study of poetry and writing can improve literacy with the connection to the lyrical movement of dance, music, and art. Through the arts, teachers can guide students in exploring figurative language, tone, rhythm, and imagery as it pertains to the arts and its relationship to the voice and…

This study investigates learners' attitudes towards poetry in foreign language learning. 63 Engineering Students at Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch attended the study. The instrument used in the study was a questionnaire designed by the researchers for the purpose of this study. The questionnaire consisted of 12 questions…

Discover the ways teachers and researchers apply up-to-date TESOL research to meet both content and language acquisition criteria while also affirming students' cultural knowledge, life experiences, and language abilities. Like the high school grades themselves, the chapters in this volume are organized by academic content area including language…

The idea of place extends beyond just the location where people live. Place is a narrative, a story that involves interactions, characters, conflicts, and the rise and flow of humanity. By understanding the importance of place and the connection to the places from which people originate, the people, their motivations, and their strengths and…

Purpose: Extant research has painted a clear picture of the myriad ways that schools are failing to provide a meaningful education, and meaningful literacy pedagogies, to all youth. Given this crisis shouldered disproportionately by youth of color in urban schools, this paper aims to take a retrospective approach to understanding the lasting…

This article, which comes out of a research project exploring teaching as intellectual work, focuses specifically on a young woman who worked as a substitute teacher after she graduated from a two-year teacher education program at her local university. For Penny, substitute teaching was an interruption as she shaped a professional life moving…

We propose that writing can be employed to foster the kind of career learning required in the twenty-first century. The article offers insights into how writing exercises and approaches can be applied to help students construct their career stories in a way that allows them to engage in a dialogical learning process and work in a self-directed…

In this article, a veteran teacher expresses the importance of drawing on the life-texts of students and recognizing the ways that personal experience influences a student's perception of the world.

Drawing on a strand of findings from the Cambridge Poetry Teaching Project, a small-scale research study co-ordinated through the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, this article examines contemporary understandings of poetry performance in teaching contexts. Positioning these understandings in relation to past practices, we…

At a conference on environmental change in Latin America, Homero Aridjis, writer, environmental activist, and founder of the Grupo de los Cien, quoted Yeats when answering my question about the connection between his prolific literary work and untiring activism: "In dreams begin responsibility." He later explained that through writing…

Drawing on Vygotsky's notion, developed by Bruner, of learners growing into "the intellectual life of those around them", this paper reports on a small-scale questionnaire survey of teachers' thinking about poetry writing and their instructional practices of teaching it. Thirty-three teachers, with a range of teaching experience and…

Many teachers are finding that weaving in examples from current movies, television, music, and popular fiction makes their lessons come alive for students. A clip from "The Daily Show" or rap lyrics can be vehicles to talk about politics and poetry. Pop culture is what students talk about in the hallways, so why not harness that interest and…

So often teachers see education as a series of units leading to an examination, which will in turn prepare students for the SATs or APs they need to pass to enter university where, if they pass other examinations, they will graduate and earn large incomes. Teachers hold those future earnings before their students like a carrot while beating them…

Many earthshaking events took place in China in 2008: the ice and snow in South China, the Lhasa riots, the hindrances to the Olympic torch relay, the Wenchuan earthquake, anticorruption in Taiwan, the Beijing Olympics, and many more. Many of these incidents triggered acute Internet altercations. In conformity with the pattern of Internet…

Learners of English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) bring an array of backgrounds, identities, and experiences to the classroom. Through exposure to other views, learners can reflect on their own place in their world and engage in "self-authoring"--a term coined by Hernandez-Zamora (2010) that refers to critical-thinking skills…