Among a minority of Longfellow's studies in China and abroad, there has even scarcely been one made from the perspective of eco-criticism. Eco-criticism aims at exploring the relation between literature and natural environment to find out the ecological wisdom in literary works so as to awaken the ecological consciousness of the contemporaries.…

In this article, Susan Weinstein and Anna West embark on a critical analysis of the maturing field of youth spoken word poetry (YSW). Through a blend of firsthand experience, analysis of YSW-related films and television, and interview data from six years of research, the authors identify specific dynamics that challenge young poets as they…

This paper begins with a discussion of Stanley Cavell's philosophy of language learning. Young people learn more than the meaning of words when acquiring language: they learn about (the quality of) our form of life. If we--as early childhood educators--see language teaching as something like handing some inert thing to a child, then we unduly…

In this response to Peter Medway's paper, "English and Enlightenment' (Changing English 17:1, 2010), I take issue with little of what he so lucidly writes, except his implicit and occasionally explicit denunciation of Romanticism as the proper basis of English pedagogy. I am concerned in this paper to emphasise the positive aspects of…

This article is concerned with the epidemic of alienation created by colonization and the ideologies that maintain systems of domination. More specifically, it argues that a decolonizing holistic pedagogy can help address the root of our individual and collective alienation to facilitate healing. This position is supported by the findings of an…

Background/Context: Throughout history, a country's economic and military strength has influenced its times of cultural splendor and the rise of famous intellectuals and artists. Spain has been an exception to this. At the turn of the 20th century, a surprising series of events that no one could have predicted occurred. At the time, Spain had…

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…

"Poetic Voices: Writing, Reading, and Responding to Poetry" was the title of the 2011 Master Class in Children's Literature. Woven into this session were the insights of poets Joyce Sidman and Pat Mora who shared their creative processes and the voices that inspire their poetry. In addition, Barbara Kiefer provided advice regarding how to connect…

Our thesis is more finely tuned to Thomas Merton (1915-68) the writer, more specifically, the poet/artist/writer and thinker. These are the components of the "Merton" voice. Merton senses the quality of innocence as the "sine qua non" of the poet or writer's vocation: "His art depends on an ingrained innocence which he would lose in business, in…

This essay begins where Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue" begins: facing a moral world in ruin. MacIntyre argues that this predicament leaves us with a choice: we can follow the path of Friedrich Nietzsche, accepting this moral destruction and attempting to create lives in a rootless, uncertain world, or the path of Aristotle, working to reclaim…

This essay explores the problematic nature of an enforced monolingual culture promoted by the current Conservative-led UK government. It comments upon the paradoxical nature of the 2014 curriculum that promotes heritage texts and "proper" English, when such poets embraced a Bakhtinian tolerance of languages. It focuses primarily upon the…

This article is an autoethnodrama, which originally began as a workshop piece coming to fruition as an enacted staged reading at the University of Illinois during Fall 2011. As an ethnodrama, the article explores the author's educational journey, pivoting around one of his fondest childhood memories reciting a Langston Hughes poem. Interwoven…

Stories and storytelling have been used for millennia to entertain, challenge and educate. As a shared form of language interaction, storytelling has engaged communities in developing and perpetuating common understandings of both language and culture, as critical foundations to harmonious societies. Stories and storytelling provide a rich source…

Although evaluation is at the core of many of the practices associated with poetry--including teaching, editing, selecting, judging, and even writing--and although there have been involved discussions of the assessment of verse, there has been no empirical investigation of the specific values which, one supposes, lie at the heart of such…

This article discusses a new way of thinking about analyzing sign-language poetry. Rather than merely focusing on the product, the method involves observing the process of its creation. Recent years have witnessed increasing literary and linguistic analysis of sign-language poetry, with commentaries on texts and performances being set within and…