This paper reflects on a visit by Christian poet John Terpstra to the final class session (on a Maundy Thursday) of my Literature and Environment course, to read his poetry suite on making a cross for his church out of a fruit-tree in an orchard being ploughed under for construction. Terpstra plays on the Stations of the Cross by interweaving the…

The biblical story of the shibboleth is widely cited in language testing as emblematic of the social and political function of language tests. But the meaning of the shibboleth has also been explored within poststructuralism, specifically within Derrida's discussion of the dilemmas of identity in the work of the German Jewish poet Paul Celan.…

Using a case study design, this study investigated the literacy identity, both collectively and individually, of the members of "Slammin!", a slam poetry team from an urban high school. Participant observation of practices and performances was used to find how the involvement in this group uniquely impacted students' academic and personal lives.…

In this article a comparison is drawn between the way in which the pragmatist philosopher and pedagogue John Dewey addressed religious issues and his view on Religious Education in his poetic narratives and in his scholarly writings, especially in his "magnus opus" on religion, "A Common Faith". Do we gain deeper insight into Dewey's view on…

In this article, the author narrates his lifelong relationship with a major American poet, Walt Whitman. He describes how Whitman's "Song of Myself" and poetic idea influenced his life and way of thinking.

From September 2008 to July 2009, the author traded academic robes for the Army Combat Uniform issued to US Navy personnel deploying to Afghanistan. Along with using the ceramic and Kevlar body armor he learned to don at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he metaphorically defended himself from the disruption to his personal and professional life that…

At the beginning of the twentieth century a new subgenre of poetry written in Spanish, but rooted in Japanese literary tradition, began to emerge in the works of Spain's vanguard and Generation of 1927 poets and among young modernist poets in Mexico and South America. Transmitted first through France and later directly from Japan, the popularity…

This article will discuss my often challenging transition from radical political poet to full time poet teacher in a Roman Catholic secondary school. Can the counter-cultural art form of spoken word education thrive within the institution of school? By looking at classroom and after school experience, student poems and relevant theory, the paper…

Being in the education community for long years, Tevfik Fikret aims to educate children and teenagers with the works he has written while he is carrying out his profession. Knowing child's world very well, the poet gives messages which can be counted valid in today's education perception. Emphasizing the basic humanistic and moral values such as…

After more than three decades of telling students that, unlike fiction, poetry is detached from the world of commerce, floating in a zone where certain pressures, including money, do not obtain, the author has begun to rethink his stance. Although poetry yields no cash in a literal sense, poets talk metaphorically about "banking" poems, allowing…

In Antonio Machado's collection "Soledades", the poet's search for identity guides an introspective quest where context, body, and mind form an intricate and inseparable connection. By extending cognitive capabilities to his natural environment, the poet, through embodied cognition and Theory of Mind, reads other people's and nature's minds to…

This article looks at how Ted Hughes' poetry for children developed over more than 30 years of publication. It traces the movement from his earlier, more conventional rhyming poems, such as "Meet My Folks!" (1961) and "Nessie the Mannerless Monster" (1964), to the mature, free verse "animal poems" for older readers of "Season Songs" (1976c),…

This article highlights the works of two prolific authors: James Bryant Conant and Maya Angelou. Among the books Conant wrote were: "The American High School Today" (1959), "Slums and Suburbs" (1961), "The Education of American Teachers" (1963), and "The Comprehensive High School" (1967). On the other hand, Angelou's series of autobiographical…

No one sincerely doubts that schools should take seriously the need to develop children's imaginations and their capacity to be imaginative. The issue is what does this mean? And what are its implications? This paper, which is mostly inspired by the writings about the imagination of two British nineteenth-century Romantic poets--Coleridge and…

This paper outlines the ways that Navajo poetry was framed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as "unsophisticated" and non-literary by the introductory materials written by non-Native Americans for collections of Native American poetry. At issue was a view that saw the use of Navajo English, a distinctive vernacular dialect, as a deficient form of…