This is the story of three professors who found collective success in certain old-time approaches to teaching. Using three different first-person perspectives from Professors Burg, Piedmont, and Kamke, we examine some of the key components of such teaching orientation that may be helpful for professors navigating increased enrollments, while…

In this article the author starts from the premise that, although there were no renowned Indian poets at Carlisle and other Indian boarding schools in the United States, students in federal boarding schools read and wrote poetry. She argues that the rhetorically bold Carlisle poems--along with the letters and articles published in the Carlisle…

This article articulates the experience of three professors from different disciplines, teaching at three levels of University Studies, Portland State University's general education program, for whom the toggling between personal/professional critical practices and use of reflective practices in the classroom has led to transformative learning…

Teaching poetry offers both challenges and promises for student engagement and response. Because of the ways many students interact with poems in school settings--with an emphasis on the technical elements of poems, rather than on the emotional resonances they evoke--for many learners, poetry can often seem elusive and uncommonly difficult. This…

What are the possibilities for poetry? This paper introduces approaches to creating and teaching poetry through a critical survey of contemporary practitioners within the field. Analysis of ekphrastic traditions, comics and concrete poetry, artists books, graffiti poems, film, performance and interdisciplinary collaborations reveal new…

In this article, the author shares her experience working on a multimedia project with her students. The project creates a context for students to reinterpret space and ethos in an elementary school. It allows students to poetically enter physical spaces and the written word through collaborative observation, contemplation, and remixing.

Two complementary bodies of literature either claim explicitly or imply that human cruelty is rooted in asymmetrical relationships. The first describes and analyzes various forms of domination and acquiescence, including colonialism, racism, imperialism, sexism, and interpersonal power dynamics, among others. The second attempts to describe what…

Cahnmann-Taylor remembers her first encounter with Dell Hymes at an open mic event at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. She puzzles his complex stance on the role ethnographic poems might play in one's ethnographic project. In Dell Hymes's honor, she shares a poetic rendering of a speech event from her bilingual…

The language of story and poetry, mythopoetic language, is at the heart of our English discipline. It is language designed to enrich our comprehension of our inner lives, a language that helps us to see beyond the literal, beyond the world revealed to us through other disciplines like science and mathematics, history and geography. In this it…

After thirty-three years of exile in Mexico, Ernestina de Champourcin returned to Madrid in 1972, in time to witness the profound political changes in Spain prompted by the death of Franco and by the cultural revolution originating in the capital known as the "movida madrileña." Between 1979 and 1980, she responded to the explosion of…

For the past few decades, stylistics has emerged as a discipline that encompasses both literary criticism and linguistics. The integration of both disciplines opened many opportunities for English literature and language teachers to get creative in their teaching--by introducing the stylistic approach in their classrooms. However, in a typical…

For the past few decades, stylistics has emerged as a discipline that encompasses both literary criticism and linguistics. The integration of both disciplines opened many opportunities for English literature and language teachers to get creative in their teaching--by introducing the stylistic approach in their classrooms. However, in a typical…

In this study, the researcher explores the role of literacy--specifically writing in the lives of adolescent Muslim girls who used writing as a sociopolitical tool when participating in a literacy collaborative grounded in Islamic principles and writing for social change. Previously, researchers have largely focused on the literacies of immigrant…

Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, a former English teacher and school counselor, is an award-winning author, best known for her children's books about the Rosebud Sioux life and culture, which combines history and legend to create culturally rich and authentic Native American stories. In this article, the authors share their conversations with Virginia…

Whether teaching undergraduate or graduate classes, the author integrates lesser-known women poets as part of the inquiry, not as curiosities, but as opportunities to discover something in the "raw" as contemporaries might have done. That the author's courses focus on or include in a substantial way the work of women is important, but does not by…