This article arises from a four week study of a class of 14-15 year old students. The study explored students' perception of themselves as writers and the effects of a variety of teaching and learning strategies on their creative writing responses. The aim of the project was to enhance the students' creative writing, whilst ascertaining whether…

Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" Saga has achieved extraordinary popularity and scholars have interrogated the nature of its appeal from a variety of perspectives. Its popularity raises questions because in many ways it mirrors romantic fictions from the 1960s and 1970s. Such fictions have been read by critics as expressions of female…

Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This…

This essay is grounded in the scholarship of teaching and learning and will focus specifically on the ways in which the Harry Potter books highlight the diversity of learning and teaching styles; privilege active experiential learning and problem solving over passive rote learning; and emphasize the benefits of collaboration over competition.…

Collective biography draws on memory work methods developed initially by feminist sociologists (Haug et al., 1987) where people collaboratively examined the social and discursive resources through which they take themselves up as particular gendered subjects in the world. Their own memories become resources to investigate processes of…

This study explored the value of using a "guided rubric" to enable students participating in a massive open online course in writing to produce more reliable assessments of their fellow students' writing. To test the assumption that training students to assess will improve their ability to provide quality feedback, a multivariate…

This article explores the relationship between hard science fiction and physics and a gendered culture of science. Empirical studies indicate that science fiction references might spur some students' interest in physics and help develop this interest throughout school, into a university education and even further later inspire the practice of…

As the psychic life of reading is imbued with desire, transferences and other forms of emotional turbulence, readers invariably and often unconsciously project their anxieties, hopes and worries onto the lives of fictional characters. Using the lens of psychoanalytic theory, this article explores the meanings produced in the convergence of teacher…

Adult men create zines (self-publications written as alternative to commercial magazines) that advance content learning and knowledge. We describe three of these zine writers who created five zines on topics related to the disciplines of science, social studies, and English/language arts. We collected their zines, interviewed the authors, and…

At-risk students are oftenn unmotivated and disengaged from literacy activities. They are sometimes below grade level and feel inadequate to accomplish the complex reading tasks with which they are confronted in high school; therefore, they often will not even attempt to do the work (Bandura, 1986). Students who are assigned to a Disciplinary…

As science fiction has a way of capturing the human imagination that few other genres can rival, this study sought to investigate the effects of using science fiction on the performance and interest of high school chemistry students. An action research approach was used to guide the first author's practice as she studied two college preparatory…

The Bechdel test, the author's student Marley explained, is named for the US graphic novelist and cartoonist Alison Bechdel. To pass the test, a work of fiction must contain at least one scene in which two or more women (preferably named characters) discuss something other than a male. Students who read from the canon of works regularly encounter…

This study explores the possibilities for learning content that might accompany the use of an historically accurate graphic novel as part of a language arts instructional unit. During a 6-day unit, 16 sixth grade students engaged in graphic novels in ways that support comprehension, both in the context of a graphic novel text set and a specific…

This article describes a fourth grade project involving elementary students, their teachers, elementary preservice teachers, and university faculty. The project focused on a work of juvenile historical fiction, culminating in social studies lessons that were interdisciplinary. This collaboration between educators was made possible by a…

The present study compares how Swedish (n = 340) and Norwegian (n = 236) teachers' human capital and social capital support reading habits as an aspect of professional development. The overall aim was to describe how teachers' human and social capital support their professional development as measured by the aspect of reading habits during leisure…