Giving quizzes to get students to read may continue to be misunderstood, even grossly undervalued. Using a quiz to encourage (enforce) reading plays a significant role not only in students learning content of their chosen field, but also as the critical first step toward an awakening of the mind--or, at the very least, the mind being more…

The current set of experiments was designed to explore the processing of spatial information during reading, specifically the "spatial-shift" effect and the "spatial-gradient" effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that when participants were presented with text alone (i.e., without prior map memorization, virtual…

This article argues that Hegel's book "The Phenomenology of Spirit" can be read as a "Bildungsroman" or a theory of reception. Hegel (as he appears in this book) sets forth to educate his readers to a historical understanding. This is the article's main argument which will be split up in three parts. First, it seems that Hegel…

Beginning with the question of the usefulness of Rousseau's "Émile" for contemporary education, this article explores the fantasy held by educational thinkers and practitioners regarding Rousseau's concept of Natural Education. Using French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's theory of fantasy, which is based on a relationship between the…

Most children across the world learn to read and write in non-alphabetic orthographies such as abjads (e.g., Arabic), abugidas (e.g., Ethiopic Ge'ez), and morphosyllabaries (e.g., Chinese). However, most theories of reading, reading development, and dyslexia derive from a relatively narrow empirical base of research in English--an outlier…

This paper considers reading a hermeneutical co-respondence with understanding's becoming. It describes how understanding's plurality is caught up in the dialogical interplay of reading, rhetoric, and rhythm characteristic of hermeneutic engagement. Reading positions a reader in relationship with a text seeking participation in the matter under…

Reading engagement is an essential component of children's reading achievement. This three-chapter dissertation considers a new approach to conceptualizing reading engagement through the lens of children's immersion, or absorption, in a text. Chapter 1 examines the theoretical underpinnings of story world absorption, sometimes known as…

Increasing numbers of researchers in the field of higher education research are searching for meaning rather than metrics: something in their data that call to them and that make their hearts soar. This paper leans into post-qualitative approaches and attempts to resist methodological arrest, drawing on the disciplinary language of literary…

Irony is a heavily context-dependent pragmatic phenomenon. But what is it about context that facilitates or blocks irony comprehension? Based on the echoic account, we suggest that a context facilitates irony comprehension when it makes manifest a speaker's intentions and attitude, i.e., when a context makes it easy for participants to engage…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates' response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character's body. This paper explores how readers' meaning making was…

The protection and regulation of religious expression present complex challenges. Blasphemy laws, which criminalize acts deemed disrespectful to religious beliefs, have been abolished in England, allowing for broader freedom of expression. However, concerns and discussions about blasphemy persist. The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman (2023), has…

Reading is an integral part of scholarly practice, though we do not often discuss how our approaches to reading differ, and how these approaches may ultimately make interpretive impact on our research. This essay considers approaches to reading in light of the concepts of proximity and orientation. Though formal "close reading" is a…

Children's literature scholars, specifically picturebook theorist and researchers, need to better understand the complicated nature of the separation and coming together of textual matter (words) and visual matter (images) and the range of relations between these entities. Various scholars have conceptualized the relations between word and image…

The aim of the paper is to present several fairy tales from Giuseppe Pitrè's collection as a potentially interesting reading material for children. Since classical fairy tales in some cases depict traditional gender roles, they can present an obstacle to children's gender construction. Therefore, it is also important to read those stories which do…

In 2016, "Last Stop on Market Street," an American picturebook by Matt de la Pena, won the Newberry Medal, a Caldecott Honor, and a Coretta Scott King illustrator honor. In March 2021, Dr Seuss Enterprises, after working "with a panel of experts, including educators," decided to cease publishing "And to Think I Saw in on…