Fairy tales have been an essential ingredient in children's literature. Canonical fairy tales passed down from generation to generation not only enrich children's imagination but connote significant values typical of the community. However, as time passes, contemporary writers often challenge these traditional values when they work on the same…

In this essay, four teacher educators explore their journeys towards foregrounding students' lived experiences when teaching literature. Data about our teaching of literature in different contexts were generated through our personal reflective narratives and ensuing dialogic critical friend conversations. Inductive thematic analysis of the…

Whether creativity can be taught or not has remained an unresolved and recurring topic of debate in creative writing. Writing that is creative and imaginative is distinguished from translation, which is more derivative. However, both activities are creative in their own unique ways. With the intent of fostering creativity in creative writing, I…

Current policy in England, informed by a version of cognitive science, enforces an absolute distinction between experts and novices, or teachers and learners; from this binary, operating in tandem with regimes of performativity instantiated in a curriculum shaped by high-stakes testing, are derived particular forms of pedagogy and particular…

Teaching English literacy in First Nations Australian communities is bound up with the policy aim of improving the social and economic outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the desire to acknowledge, recognise and respect their unique cultural identities, languages and knowledges. But for English literacy teachers working…

This essay examines a half-term of Year 9 work on "An Inspector Calls," with a particular focus on group discussion, writing in role and class reading of the text. I argue that extensive talking before writing is an invaluable way to elicit pupil insight; I then argue that this is necessarily a collaborative endeavour. I then go on to…

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…

In the fall of 2021, an engaged group of NYU graduate students assembled to discuss Angie Thomas' YA novel "The Hate U Give." The class was composed of one Black student among a group of white students. On the night the group discussed "The Hate U Give," the freedom of discourse broke down significantly. The white students…

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…

This article discusses two schemes for teaching writing in schools. One uses analysis of model texts into techniques and devices then application of these by students to their written compositions and one uses a process approach that includes pre-writing and exploring, drafting, sharing and discussing, revising and celebrating to exploit students'…

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,…

This essay considers the relative merits of critical writing and writing in role as a means of enabling and assessing students' responses to literary texts. Drawing largely on the author's experience of teaching "Frankenstein," it argues that the distinction between critical and creative writing is not as absolute as is sometimes…

Our starting point is provided by two accounts of observed lessons. The two lessons happened, at more or less the same time, in the same English department in an East London secondary school. Both lessons, observed by the second- and third-named authors, involved the shared reading of the same novel. We are interested in the difference between…

Qualitative practitioner research undertaken by teachers in schools is a vital means of developing pedagogy and practice, one that is under-valued in today's educational climate. This essay explores representations of students in qualitative studies, which, I argue, necessarily transform student participants into 'characters' within the…

A consideration of how reading may change in retirement and old age, demonstrated in relation to five books by women.