Throughout history humans have dreamed of a better life. This concept of utopia can be used as a central focus for thematic and interdisciplinary instruction. This approach has three key advantages. First, students recognize that certain themes are consistent across time and place and that realization can lead students to explore their own dreams…

This study examined a writing methods course for early childhood preservice teachers (PSTs). Addressing the concerns for the teaching of writing, the course sought to engage PSTs in learning designed to create cognitive shifts concerning their perceptions about writing. The goal of the study was to analyze how a writing methods course mediated…

In recent years, contentiously for some, universities have developed generalist skills lists and associated curricula in response to government demand for more "employment-ready" graduates. Such training usually includes writing and communication. In Australia and the UK, guidelines designed to support the development of skills…

In some quarters it is argued that, narrative researchers might be classified as being either story-analysts or storytellers. They go on to suggest that one feature of storytellers is that they undertake a form of analysis as the process of writing unfolds. With these sentiments in mind, in the present paper, we consider how auto-ethnographical…

The author observes that, in "Applied Utility and the Auto-Ethnographic Short Story: Persuasions for, and Illustrations of, Writing Critical Social Science," Gilbourne, Jones and Jordan present claims about why we might choose to represent auto-ethnographic data in a literary form such as short story and for the "potential" or…

Even though the existence and importance of inner forms of sign-making are acknowledged in social-semiotic educational research, their contours have, none the less, yet to be charted in a systematic way. This article uses a combination of social-semiotic and pragmatist approaches to bring into focus some characteristics of pupils' inner…

Ventura García Calderón (1886-1959) was a Peruvian man of letters and a diplomat who was at the center of the hispanophone community in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. Known as a proponent of Spanish American literature, García Calderón achieved a global celebrity for his dramatic, colorful, and ironic short stories. These…

Since it was first published in 2011, "A Manifesto for Education" by Gert Biesta and Karl Anders Säfström has received numerous enthusiastic reviews and been hailed as providing "an alternative vision for education". Such enthusiasm, however, is perhaps not purely attributable to the substance of the text but also to the form…

The article begins by assessing Enid Blyton's contribution to the Arthurian revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, setting this in the context of longstanding debates about the function of children's literature. It goes on to argue that Blyton's use of the story of Enid in "The Knights of the Round…

Written before the successful publication of Skellig (1998), David Almond's short story collection, "Counting Stars," has attracted less critical attention than his more famous novels. Falling between fiction and autobiography, the earlier short stories are more firmly grounded in realism than the novels, which feature elements of…

Viewing Tolstoy's works from psychological and intellectual perspectives demonstrates his approach to children's literacy and especially the development of reasoning, which he presents in his writing for children and the stories he includes in his "New ABC" book (1875a) and four "Readers" (1875b). This article…

Using Ivanic's (2004) framework, the study of 20 elementary teachers examines the relationships among teachers' beliefs about writing, their instructional practices, and contextual factors. While the district-adopted curriculum reflected specific discourses, teachers' beliefs and practices reflected a combination of discourses. The…

With the increase in undergraduate and graduate programs for creative writing at institutions of higher education in North America, literary journals and magazines now serve as leading scholarly publishing outlets and research resources for creative-writing faculty and students. This study analyzes ten years of citations from nineteen leading…

In recent years a number of comparative studies based on an established approach to genre analysis have been published in the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) literature. Studies in this emerging strand of research typically aim to identify how the rhetorical structure of a particular genre (a text type) or part of a genre may vary across…

The term "genre" first came into the field of second-language (L2) writing and, in turn, the field of English for specific purposes (ESP) in the 1980s, with the research of John Swales, first carried out in the UK, into the introduction section of research articles. Other important figures in this area are Tony Dudley-Evans, Ann Johns…