The purpose of this article is to describe the stances put forward by a selection of professional development resources interpreting the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers, and to analyse where these resources stand in relation to research in ELA. Specifically, we analyse resources written by English educators…

This article examines constructions of "American" identity and place in the first influential guides for English teaching published in the United States at the cusp of the 20th Century. It recovers how English teaching was to weaken youths' ties to more immediate people and places and to reorient their sense of self, others and the…

Building on the principles of philosophical hermeneutics, Ricoeur (1984) used the concept of narrative to explain how individuals interpret their experiences and make sense of seemingly disconnected elements of life by turning them into the stories. Narrative identities represent the coming together of the stories individuals tell, as well as…

English teachers in England have experienced a lengthy period of external constraint, increasingly controlling their practice. This constraint was originated in the 1989 National curriculum. Although in its first version it was in harmony with practice, its numerous revisions have moved it a long way from teachers' own values and beliefs. This…

This article examines the process and results of a two-year cross-cultural blogging project conducted between American fifth-graders (15 students) and Taiwanese tenth-graders (23 students). The two groups of students used a blog to correspond with each other and share their reading responses of culturally relevant picture books. The goal of the…

New Zealand students in the middle and upper school achieve better results in reading than they do in writing. This claim is evident in national assessment data reporting on students' literacy achievement. Research findings also state that teachers report a lack of confidence when teaching writing. Drawing on the National Writing Project developed…

In this article we document observations of our own young children's usage of technology in their "out-of-school" worlds. How might these technologies and practices be changing the understandings and usage of texts and literacies of the children who enter into classroom spaces? What transformative possibilities might these home technology…

Over the last two decades in many countries, culturally responsive, multicultural and bilingual approaches to teaching have largely been replaced by standardised curricula and pedagogy, rooted in a political shift toward neoliberalism that has pushed business models of school reform. I argue that neoliberal reforms, by negating the central…

This article examines the effects of using intertextual theories to refine writing instruction in culturally diverse contexts, in terms of transfer of learning. Within a wider, two-year intervention study in six schools, four teachers were observed for a term each to describe how intertextual theories resulted in refinements to writing instruction…

Literacy literate has become a contested and dynamic concept in the 21st century (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro & Cammack, 2004). Images are increasingly a primary means of communication and they have been emancipated and democratised in the post-literate age. Images are accessible, and are being endlessly reproduced and manipulated on a scale never seen…

In this paper we look at what the critical tradition in education has to offer to the phenomenon of social media. Through an overview and evaluation of the approaches advocated by practitioners of critical literacy and critical media literacy, we illustrate the limitations of applying these frameworks to the fluid and densely interwoven spaces of…

This essay focuses on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia (that is, the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN), and explores the way this reform is mediating the work of English literacy educators in primary and secondary schools. We…

This article considers an exchange between pupils in response to heard poetry, approaching it through a "conversation analytic mentality" informed by the theories of Basil Bernstein. Using his terms, it describes an existing "pedagogic device" of poetry study for schools, to which responses under discussion do not easily correlate. This is more…

The status of poetry both in the writing curriculum and in wider popular culture is best described as mixed (Wilson, 2009). In spite of a strong post-war tradition of enthusiasm for the teaching of poetry writing, it is currently felt to be marginalised in the writing curriculum (Dymoke, 2007; Ofsted, 2007). This paper reports on the beliefs,…

Using a theoretical grounding in social semiotics, chronotopes, and social spaces with youth, I will discuss how identities are made possible and expressed in the interplay between the different parts of the youth video production process as youth artifacts as they move through time and space. The majority of my data is what I have come to term…