This essay examines learners' understanding of how they use role. It draws upon a semi-structured interview with five Year 7 students, which took place after their first lesson exploring "Darkwood Manor," a gothic sequence of drama. Considering the elements which shape how they adopt roles in the classroom, I interrogate the students'…

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…

"English as a lingua franca (ELF)" is a well-known concept for English used as an international contact language among people from diverse linguacultural backgrounds. Using a questionnaire, we explored the attitudes of Spanish and Swedish pre-service primary school teachers towards English and its users after their collaboration on a…

This essay investigates the classroom talk and reflections of a Year 5 lesson on reading and writing beyond Standard English. Its title refers to 'Reflecting Realities', the CLPE survey of ethnic diversity in UK children's books. In changing 'reflecting' to 'representing' I seek to move beyond concern with sourcing representative texts to the work…

This article explores the ways in which the language of the hero's journey can serve as a heuristic for teachers at all stages of their professional experience. Teachers in Canada and the United States were interviewed via Skype about their experiences around writing and literacy. Four teachers are profiled here, two from Canada and two from the…

This essay explores the place of debating, talk and group work in the Secondary English classroom. It discusses the ways in which pupils in one student teacher's year 7 class thrive in the dialogic classroom against the backdrop of curricular and attitudinal change. It considers the importance of talk and debate amongst the 'communities of…

I examine the ways in which reading in the classroom is a social practice and how that social practice can produce nuanced student texts that reflect a rich understanding of what has been read. In doing so, I also consider how the reading environment allows us to manipulate and embody texts in ways that allow for a more detailed understanding than…

This article is an investigation into the Reading Partners scheme at a large inner London comprehensive school in England; this research comes from a small scale study I carried out as part of my Masters of Teaching at the Institute of Education, University College London. Reading Partners is a project whereby younger and older students within the…

In evaluating some of Heaney's prose writings about the art of poetry -- what I have called his 'Poetics' -- the paper explores how those ideas could enhance the teaching of poetry in the upper post-primary schools. The paper is divided into four closely interconnected sections. The first section evaluates Heaney's thoughts about the potential…

This paper argues that there is scope for considerable change and improvement in the way in which Poetry is taught at Key Stage Two in Northern Ireland. In making this case for significant improvement, the paper has three interconnected parts. In the first part, a range of critical ideas highlight the richness of poetry as a literary genre.…

This paper explores a three-year Creative Professional Development programme for teachers which encourages them to develop their skills as writers and illustrators in order to bring creative and original ideas about writing and illustrating into their classroom practice. The implicit message within such a programme is that without it, teachers,…

This article considers children's engagement with the "Ologies", a series of postmodern texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. It follows on from a text-based analysis of the series published in this journal (22(3) 2015). Data collected from 9-12 year olds demonstrate how actual readers took up the invitation offered by…

This article offers a case study account of a garden-themed poetry writing project run by a creative writing organisation in partnership with a class of 9-10-year-old children from a London primary school. I explore the concept of creativity which framed the five-week project and analyse the different ways in which the creative practitioner worked…

In an attempt to understand how a narrowed version of accountability in the form of high-stakes assessment deepens inequity rather than improves educational equity, we examine three education documents in Jamaica using critical discourse analysis. Our two research questions were: How did each government document position the Grade Four Literacy…