Experiment is at the heart of science and this was a consideration in the planning of an Association for Science Education (ASE) conference in the summer term that could be guided, but not controlled, by experience from the Annual Conference at New Year. Different formats for the exhibitions, lectures and practical presentations could all be tried…

This paper considers how "knowledge" of China was presented for Victorian and Edwardian children in "The Boy's Own Paper" ("BOP") between 1879 and 1914. It considers how genre affects the representation of China in the "BOP" by comparing travel narratives and adventure stories. First, it focuses on…

This essay follows the insights of reader response theory to examine how readers of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Alice McKinley series negotiate textual meaning and construct particular identities in relation to the series' controversial content. Ranking second on the American Library Association's top one hundred list of banned and challenged books…

The increasing visuality of our culture was observed in 1994 by Mitchell, who coined the term "pictorial turn" to describe the interest in the visual taking place in culture and discourse (Mitchell, 1994). Since then, this process has increased further, particularly in all the areas of digital/new media. This chapter will consider this…

In this article, the author describes several innovative activities for engaging students in studies of literary characters: voting on superlatives for characters, creating characters' Facebook profiles, and composing creative dialogs in which characters from different works meet each other. The author points out that it is this self-knowledge…

'Visualizing Transmedia Networks: Links, Paths and Peripheries' examines the increasingly complex rhetorical intersections between narrative and media ("old" and "new") in the creation of transmedia fictions, loosely defined as multisensory and multimodal stories told extensively across a diverse media set. In order…

Local history, historical fiction, and one of the most significant events of the twentieth century come together in this article as Jon Grant and Dan Townsend suggest a way to enable students to produce better historical fiction and improve their understanding of the history of their own area. They develop the work on historical fiction…

Drawing from a sociohistorical understanding of the roles of texts for African American males and data from a recent survey of teens' meaningful experiences with texts, the author provides a general understanding of the roles of texts among African American males and African American male adolescents' meaningful relationships with texts. These…

This essay explores the career of the understudied writer Pedro Castera (1846-1906), who is regarded as one of the first practitioners of science fiction in Mexico. A man of many talents, Castera is one of the most eccentric and eclectic figures in the intellectual life of fin-de-siècle Mexico City. His career took many turns: While during…

In the last decade, schools have seen an increasing number of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and the current estimated average of children in the United States who are diagnosed with an ASD is one out of 68 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2014). One way for educators and elementary students to learn about ASD is through…

It can be difficult to interest students in academic topics if they have no prior exposure to or experience of the subject. The authors introduce and discuss a pedagogic innovation designed to trigger interest in entrepreneurship and "enterprise culture". They use fiction in the form of Gothic context and the vampire motif to move the…

What if you could challenge your second graders to design an outdoor STEM classroom with a butterfly garden, birdbath, and sundial? With this volume in the "STEM Road Map Curriculum Series," you can! "Investigating Environmental Changes" outlines a journey that will steer your students toward authentic problem solving while…

Given the CDC's report of a 30% increase in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses over the past two years, it is important to increase awareness and educate teachers and students in both general and special education classrooms. One way to bridge the gap between students with and without ASD is to use authentic narrative fiction as a teaching…

This study builds upon work in task-based language teaching and literary studies to explore the use of fan fiction as a pedagogical tool in a technology-enhanced university foreign language class. A task-based fan fiction project, The Blogging Hobbit, modelled on blog-based role-play storytelling found in online media fandoms, was carried out in a…

The author has undertaken a narrative inquiry that explores the political and cultural positioning of drama education in the English secondary school. The inquiry also serves as both an experiment in and an argument for the relevance of a storying methodology in educational research. The reader is encouraged through the employment of particular…