What happens when, in a nation under lockdown, teaching moves online? How is English as a school subject being differently configured? What are the gains and losses? This essay examines, through the prism of a single online lesson, the approach to English, to curriculum and pedagogy, that has been adopted by the Oak National Academy website, a…

Two high school students Jorisi and Elizabeth, after two weeks stuck at home during the COVID outbreak, wrote these reflections for their English class.

This essay attempts to explore the links between politics, poetry, and collective, embodied readings and discussion in the classroom. When my Year 12 class were asked 'What is Poetry?', their answers suggested something in the Romantic tradition -- of poetry as expressive, individual and emotional. My experience studying poetry with my Year 9…

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…

Caribbean students are repeatedly engaged in rigid forms of writing to meet the requirements of external exams, which often leads to negative attitudes to writing. With current shifts to multimodal and multi-literate texts to engage students' multiple literacies in learning, students' creation of graphic novels in Caribbean English classrooms can…

This article looks at the ways in which the semiotics of authority are established and challenged during a secondary school English lesson on "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde". I focus on the utterances of one student and the context of the classroom in which she finds herself as a means to explore the ways in which pedagogic…

How might English classrooms be spaces where Muslim students are empowered to recognise and resist Islamophobia? This qualitative study draws on theories of critical consciousness and Islamophobia to show how Bassim, a Muslim student, makes sense of Islamophobic encounters through the poetic and analytic writing he creates in his public high…

The play within a play has long been understood as Hamlet's attempt to catch the conscience of the King. But is that all it is? Perhaps there's more to the "Murder of Gonzago" than either Hamlet or even Shakespeare, himself, intended? While the narrative of the Player King and Player Queen clearly works to tap into the private guilt of…

This essay illustrates the application of reception study, the subfield of literary history that emphasises the historical experiences of readers, to pedagogical contexts by investigating the teaching of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925) in American high schools during the 1980s. Focusing on the episode in which Jay Gatsby…

Over the decades, efforts have been made to incorporate diverse perspectives on World Englishes into English Language Teaching (ELT) practice and teaching materials. To date, the majority of ELT learners and teachers have not yet been exposed to materials which use and explore non-standard forms of English. This paper examines the attitudes of…

This essay explores the role that storytelling might play in the professional learning of English teachers. It begins by reflecting on the ways that stories shape our everyday lives, and then considers how the meaning-making potential of storytelling might enable us to gain insights into our work as educators. This is in contradistinction to the…

This essay charts the experiences of a group of Year 10 students studying literature together. I challenge the current educational thinking that the literature classroom should consist exclusively of a set of canonised texts handed down from teacher to student. Instead I consider the importance of ensuring students have space to explore themselves…

In this paper we highlight findings from a teacher inquiry group study designed to explore possibilities for teaching contemporary Canadian literature to promote issues of social justice in secondary classrooms. Drawing on Boler and Zembylas's notion of a "pedagogy of discomfort," our paper will focus on the experiences of two teachers…

How do students draw on texts read in class to explore and make sense of the world? How does role-play open up the possibilities of utilising these resources, remaking them for their own purposes? How does play, as Vygotsky suggests, enable students to achieve more? And how does being in role change the character of social relations in the…

This case-study explores the effects of a school-wide writing competition and the implementation of a poetry-writing unit across all junior English classes in a rural New Zealand school. Teacher interview data were thematically analysed using a social constructionist lens. Results highlight the varied strategies adopted by teachers, while…