Audiobooks have been growing in popularity over the last decade. Although researchers have increasingly recognised the value of audiobooks as rich multimodal texts that support literacy engagement in classrooms, there have been few detailed pictures of classroom practice related to audiobooks. In this practitioner narrative, a secondary English…

Acts of sexual violence and rape, as well as the ensuing treatment of survivors and those who perpetuate the crimes, are pervasive in canonical texts that populate mandated reading lists in secondary English classrooms. Given the outsized role the literary canon places in English curriculum, we believe English teachers must develop practices that…

This paper comprises a re-reading of the 1955 novel by John Wyndham, "The Chrysalids," in conversation with philosopher Rosi Braidotti's formation of critical posthumanism. The author argues that such re-readings of curricular fixtures within secondary English classrooms constitutes a necessary pragmatic intervention in a school system…

This article examines the terms "avant-garde" and "vanguard" as keywords for teaching English through the concept of political agency. For example, political theorist Lea Ypi has conceptualised an 'avant-garde political agency' as an experimental process that is meant to be both rhetorically effective and grounded in historical…

This article draws upon Roland Barthes' theory of "myth" to unpack how "student progress" is conceptualised and measured in the curriculum and assessment of GCSE English in secondary schools in England. Using case studies of three Year 11 students, I critique aspects of the government's Progress 8 accountability measure, their…

The 'knowledge turn' in curriculum studies has proved highly influential in the past two decades. But what is meant by knowledge remains both unclear and subject to contestation, particularly in relation to English as a school subject. Two recent books address the knowledge question in very different ways.

This narrative inquiry explores the author's attempt to teach Henry James's novella "The Turn of the Screw" in a high school English class, making the celebration of confusion -- in the tradition of John Dewey -- the cornerstone of the experience. The students' interpretive discourse is analysed, prompting reflection on promising…

In this paper, we report data from the first national survey of secondary Shakespeare teaching in the UK, conducted online in 2017-18 with a sample of 211 teachers distributed throughout Wales, England, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. In this article, we outline the pedagogical practices which are dominant. Specifically, we examine the group of…

This essay uses storytelling as a mode of inquiry to explore how students with languages other than English and with diasporic experiences and identities negotiate a pathway for themselves in a relentlessly Anglophone environment. I share a story that provides a small window into the everyday work of an English teacher in a large, linguistically…

This study investigates how young elementary children engage with conceptions of gender in connection to video gameplay in the language arts classroom. During a three-week unit on video game literacies in a multiage lab school, children learned about, played, discussed, and wrote about video games. Student writing, game reviews, and literature…

This paper tells a story of one student teacher's experiences as she considers the choice of fiction texts studied by young secondary learners of English, and how those texts are taught. Based on a series of interviews carried out in the South-West of England and Wales, the narrative provides a perspective on the limitations of current curricula…

Focusing on moments in the English classroom imbued with affective forces that produce racial differentiation is central to the support of classrooms addressing race and racism. This work focuses on an event in an English classroom where race was constructed in ways that disrupted not only silence but habitual ways of social differentiation.…

Understanding global perspectives and international cultures is important because of increasing global mobility, digital connections, and national chauvinism. As students engage with diverse others in schools and online, they need global, critical, and ethical understandings of language, literacy, and culture. From a critical cosmopolitan lens,…

How does a beginning teacher go about constructing a teacherly identity in a pandemic? How does one reconcile what might be with what is, as dictated by the rhetoric of a neoliberal government, which prizes the individual mind over the collective one, the product over the process, and results over relationships? This essay explores these questions…

This article investigates the teaching of rhetoric as a discrete discipline within the curriculum of Tudor-era English grammar schools (such as the King's New Grammar School in Stratford-Upon-Avon, where William Shakespeare is believed to have been educated). It examines more recent attempts to advocate for the value of rhetoric as a unifying…