This article examines classroom practices that draw upon students' understandings of race and equity as they engage in critical literature inquiry to explore issues of power in our society. Our research team, comprising a fifth-grade classroom teacher, a doctoral candidate, and a university professor, analyzed students' written and digital…

According to the author, as our abilities to combine image and text become more sophisticated and ubiquitous, digital storytelling is a powerful means for sharing those stories. Digital storytelling is a perfect way to remix stories. To present American literature as relevant to students' lives, the author rewrote their curriculum using backwards…

For over a decade, America's educational policymakers have devalued the role of literature in K-12 classrooms. By welding federal funding to initiatives such as Reading First, government officials have downplayed the importance of reading literature and have argued against giving children voluntary, free reading time in which students can select…

The present paper, as the subtitle indicates, reexamines the conscience of Huckleberry Finn, which means both that the author provides a close reading of key chapters of Mark Twain's great novel and that he engages Jonathan Bennett's well-known and oft-cited paper, "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn." Bennett says that an episode in chapter 16 of…

Launched in June 2016, the Smithsonian Learning Lab (SLL) provides access to the digital resources from across the Smithsonian's 19 museums, 9 major research centers, and the National Zoo, to be used as real-world learning experiences. It is designed to aid students in building lasting knowledge and critical skills that take learners from simply…

This article presents an interview with Karl Kroeber that was originally published in "English Department Updates" (Fall 2009), a semiannual alumni newsletter of the Columbia University Department of English & Comparative Literature. In this interview, Kroeber, who taught at Columbia for 57 years, discusses the range of courses he…

The myth of home is what distinguishes children's literature from adult novels (Wolf 1990). Nodelman and Reimer ("The Pleasures of Children's Literature," 2003) write that while "the home/away/home pattern is the most common story line in children's literature, adult fiction that deals with young people who leave home usually ends…

The use of service learning in university courses can be limited depending on the class and the subject matter. In this article, the authors provide examples of two teachers' experiences with service learning in literature courses, showing service learning can have a home in fields of study where it might not initially seem to belong. The authors…

This dissertation attempts to explain how nineteenth-century American Spiritualist literature may have made readers feel like they were hearing voices, touching the dead, seeing celestial spaces, or enjoying other sensory proofs of the afterlife. Spiritualists believed that, while all human beings possessed faculties designed to perceive the dead,…

This dissertation examines the rise of the creative writing program in American higher education and considers its influence on contemporary American poetry. I investigate how the patronage of the university has impacted American poetry and reconfigured the contemporary literary landscape. Using Mark McGurl's (2009) groundbreaking research on…

This paper suggests how the "weird fiction" of H.P. Lovecraft might be mobilised within secondary English classrooms to examine aspects of visual literacy, literary style, narrative form and intertextuality. The approach that is outlined is characterised, after Lovecraft's famous monster, as a "Cthulhuic literacy" and is…

This study explores the impact of reading "Huckleberry Finn" through the lens of critical race theory for both teacher and students in a racially diverse urban high school environment. The teacher/researcher used narrative inquiry and creative non-fiction to examine student language usage, white privilege (including her own), and student…

This essay seeks to explore some of the common challenges facing teachers of multicultural American literature, particularly in the general education classroom. More specifically, the author addresses two typical student responses to this body of literature: the tendency to see the literature as entirely foreign and the tendency to universalize or…

This article is based on part of a case study looking into how sixth form students search for goal related information online for an open-ended task. Qualitative data was gathered through think-aloud protocols; analysis was informed by Afflerbach and Cho's (2009) Hypertext reading strategies. From the perspective of multiple documents literacy and…

In Cameroon, popular belief associates American literature with its country's economic and political greatness. Yet, if millions of Cameroonians show a growing enthusiasm for a visit to the US, just a few are interested in learning its literature. Using theories on the reading and teaching of literature, statistical data based on a questionnaire,…