Literature Classroom Research Articles

Swedish Feminist Manga and Critical Comics Pedagogy in Natalia Batista’s Sword Princess Amaltea

This article considers the Swedish feminist manga Sword Princess Amaltea and its pedagogical paratexts. Originally released in three parts from 2013 to 2015, Sword Princess Amaltea was written and drawn by the Swedish comics artist Natalia Batista, and has been translated and published in several languages, including English and German. Batista’s manga draws inspiration from both Japanese shôjo or girls’ manga and Nordic feminist literature. In this article I show how Batista cleverly makes use of manga’s visual conventions to challenge conventional representations of gender, sexuality, and the gaze. As a manga aimed at least in part at younger readers in school contexts, Sword Princess Amaltea and its accompanying instructional materials raise questions of genre and visual literacy in the language and literature classroom. Calling attention to the transnational circulation of manga and its genres, I analyze Sword Princess Amaltea with its paratexts in order to demonstrate the potential for a queer and feminist comics pedagogy.

Impact of “Socratic Cues” on Young Learners’ Reasoning Abilities of Graphic Novels Through Writing Comprehension

Critical reasoning ability was regarded as an essential skill for the 21stcentury, and it was crucial for pupils to develop this skill beginning from a young age. This research was based on the problem where pupils could not provide critical ideas in writing and could not generate various ideas during their pre-writing stage. This study proposed to improve young learners’ reasoning ability using the Socratic questioning strategy when reading graphic novels in the English Literature classroom. Throughout this research, “Socratic cues” was introduced as a means of assisting pupils in doing their writing tasks and trigger pupils’ reasoning ability regarding a certain topic. This case study adopted a mixed-methods approach in which three instruments were used to obtain triangulated data that included a pre-and post-test, a semi-structured interview, and an observation checklist. The research participants were selected through nonprobability convenience sampling consisting of fifteen pupils from a rural primary school in Negeri Sembilan. The results indicated that using “Socratic cues” had a positive impact on improving all fifteen participants’ reasoning ability through graphic novels. Through the use of Socratic cues, it was evident that pupils felt empowered and engaged in the classroom

Authors of everyday life. Towards learning with literary learner texts in English language education

In the digital realm of the 21st century, the production and distribution of literature has changed drastically; writing literary texts is no longer a privilege of professional authors and publishers but has transformed into a participatory practice, with non-professional writers sharing their own literary narratives via social media platforms. This digital practice has become particularly relevant among teenagers and young adults as they increasingly use the opportunity of producing and sharing their own literary texts as a means of negotiating their identities and the social environments around them. Literature, thus, enables teenagers to participate in society by voicing their own personal and social concerns. Given their value in the context of engaging in these meaning-making processes on the one hand, and the role and importance of English as one of the lingua francas in digital realms on the other, these digital literary practices also need to be reflected in contemporary English language education (ELE). However, this hardly seems to be the case so far. Although literary texts still play a very prominent role, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms in Germany, current approaches to learning with literature still appear to perceive learners as recipients of professional literary texts, while production-oriented perspectives on teenagers as authors of their everyday lives, which go beyond post-reading creative tasks, seem to hold a most marginal position. Thus, digital texts written by learners (i.e., literary learner texts) are hardly considered as source texts. This theoretical contribution argues that contemporary practices of learning with literature need to be complemented by also focusing on literary works created by learners on multiple levels of classroom action. Drawing on interdisciplinary concepts, it explores the relevance of this focus in detail and makes first suggestions for framing literature classrooms based on literary learner texts.

Along and Against the Grain: Close reading The History of Mary Prince

Due to the highly mediated conditions of its production, The History of Mary Prince presents a challenge to New Critical methods of reading that are frequently taught in undergraduate literature classrooms. Without questioning the British abolitionists’ textual representation of Prince’s experiences, readers unfamiliar with the historical conditions for slave narratives may attribute the publication’s sentimentalism and representations of violence as direct expressions of Prince. This essay mobilizes close reading towards contrary ends: I throw the editor’s (Thomas Pringle’s) paratextual material, particularly the Preface, under scrutiny by close reading its insistence on transparency and symmetry between the first-person narrative and Prince as the narrative's univocal source. Using the Preface as an apparatus for close reading The History, I emphasize the dissonance between, on the one hand, the British abolitionists’ textual representation of freedom and, on the other, Prince’s speech as a practice of freedom. Drawing on the methods developed by Marisa Fuentes and Ann Laura Stoler, I offer historical and geographical contexts that can be layered onto close readings exercises for The History – particularly around repeated tropes of salt and allusions to sugar – that destabilize Thomas Pringle’s, and by extension the London Antislavery Society’s, representation of Prince’s public image. I argue how the paratextual materials of The History can help instructors foreground the contradictions and asymmetries of power embedded in subaltern representations.

Cross-Border Dialogues: A Collaborative Instructional Design Inquiry to Promote Equity and Diversity

The COVID-19 pandemic complicates ingrained educational inequalities around the globe and foregrounds the pertaining challenges that teachers have encountered due to school closures and the shift to distance learning. This cross-border teacher education project intended to examine how academics and pre-service teachers in different geographic locales could collaboratively explore equitable learning opportunities for diverse learners through the use of critical media literacies to respond to interconnected global crises. In this six-week cross-border teacher education project, we recruited four Mandarin and English literacy teacher candidates in Hong Kong to interact with one another and one Canadian professor as part of the teacher preparation phase of a larger-scale cross-border research project that connects youth from Hong Kong and Canada in a social networking space. For the purposes of teacher professional development, the Hong Kong teacher candidates and Canadian researchers engaged in collective exploration of how instructional designs in literacy education could promote equitable learning opportunities for diverse learners. Findings show that the cross-border teacher education project supported teacher candidates’ development of pedagogical skills and espoused their agency in promoting educational equity and collective problem-solving through critical media literacies. Findings relate the teacher candidates’ shifted perspectives from focusing on students’ decontextualized language skills to nurturing critical media skills. Changing from a deficit-oriented view about what literacy learners could not do, the teacher candidates also adopted an asset-oriented view about the linguistic and cultural repertoires that diverse learners could bring to literacy classrooms.

Student teachers’ reflections on semiotics in Grade 3 isiXhosa literacy lessons

Background: Globally, teaching practice has been at the heart of teacher education programmes. For quality teaching and learning, literacy student teachers are expected to develop metacognitive attributes and critical thinking to integrate theory and practice. Because of the dominance of autonomous models in literacy teaching and learning nationally and internationally, literature continues to report poor literacy attainment, especially for indigenous language learners. Contrasting this deficit view, this article employed languaging as a lens to describe student teachers’ reflections on their interactions with Grade 3 learners using multimodal and linguistic repertoires, which they both bring from socio-cultural contexts as well as utilisation of embodied representational modes.Aim: To explore how Foundation Phase (FP) student teachers used languaging and semiotic modes to enhance literacy teaching and learning in Grade 3 classrooms.Setting: An Eastern Cape Institution of Higher Education.Methods: In this qualitative study, four purposely selected FP isiXhosa Home Language student teachers used reflective journals to articulate their individual and peer classroom literacy practices. Data were thematically analysed.Results: Findings revealed the importance of acknowledging authentic and diverse linguistic resources that learners bring from their socio-cultural backgrounds as well as the use of multimodal literacies in the classroom context.Conclusion: This study concludes that languaging allowed learners and student teachers to exploit multimodalities and linguistic repertoires that they bring from their socio-cultural backgrounds.Contribution: This study demonstrates the pedagogical literacy strategies that created live dialogical engagements between student teachers and learners. These can be useful to teacher educators as well as teachers in the Foundation Phase contexts and thus improve literacy teaching and learning, especially in indigenous languages.

Improving K-12 Classroom Literacy Instruction with the Model of the Complete, Literate Student: Shared Perspectives by MSEd Reading Program Graduates

Improving K-12 Classroom Literacy Instruction with the Model of the Complete, Literate Student: Shared Perspectives by MSEd Reading Program Graduates

INTEGRATING POPULAR CULTURE IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM: BASIS FOR A TEACHING MODEL

Popular culture’s integration with language lessons, particularly in literature lessons, is a practice already being employed by teachers. Earlier studies, both local and international, were already conducted, integrating pop culture references and materials in the literature classroom: memes, shows, music, games, among others, and groundworks about the approaches in teaching literature and different models in teaching exist but no studies have suggested a teaching model based on the integration of said variables. The current study tried to formulate a basis for a teaching model based on the integration of popular culture and literature lessons. English teachers at the secondary level, especially those who worked in public or private schools in Malolos, Bulacan, were asked how they incorporate pop culture into their literature classes, what challenges they face, and how they deal with them. The study utilized a qualitative ethnographic approach based on the etic perspective. For the investigation, a triangulation method was used. This includes evaluating the teacher-informants' responses to the provided structured essay questions, conducting a focus group discussion, and comparing literature and studies on popular culture and literature instruction. The discussion sharing and the replies to the essay questions were compared to Weil and Joyce's (1973) guidelines for a teaching model. The findings produced a model of teaching based on the specifications of environment, operation, procedure, and learning outcomes.

Textual space and its importance to school ethos and cultural pedagogy

ABSTRACT This paper theoretically demonstrates the potential of textual space in making an important contribution to school ethos and cultural pedagogy. It demonstrates how culturally-inclusive (representational) textual space can be expanded throughout the school and could contribute to social justice and decolonisation efforts beyond the English Literature classroom. This is increasingly important in an age of culturally and politically securitised schooling, where government control exercised at the macro-level (colonial/neoliberal education policy) and micro-level (teaching and learning; the enactment of the formal curriculum) reproduces cultural inequality. This paper therefore argues for textual space in the English Literature classroom to be appropriated as a representational, dialogical, historical and connected space (in opposition to neoliberalism’s decontextualising and atomising agenda) for real-world political action and the democratisation of cultural production within the wider school environment.

Pedagogical variations of critical literacies practices in a secondary transnational education program

A case study design was employed in a secondary-level transnational education program to shed light on the complexity of critical literacies practices in the transnational education space. Findings reveal three pedagogical approaches to critical literacies in the English literacy classrooms, whereas critical reading of texts was salient in the Mandarin class. Data unravel that human and nonhuman entities assembled to affect the enactment of various critical literacies approaches and students’ meaning making in the globalized school context (e.g., the school's multiculturalism, its technological materiality, the IB curriculum, teachers’ prior life/professional experience, students’ cross-border experiences, and global accountability). The paper recommends that critical literacies in globalized schooling contexts should engage cognitive processes, as well as transnational youths’ embodied cross-border experiences, their multilingual/multimodal repertoires, and histories and realities related to their languages. Such an approach to critical literacies could enable bi/multilingual learners’ ethical meaning making across places, languages, and modes.

Opportunities to learn literacy in digital classrooms in New Zealand primary schools: Does class achievement level make a difference?

Teaching that is responsive to students requires adjusting lessons based on the current expertise of the students. However, such an approach comes with a degree of instructional risk if the expectations for achievement are lessened for lower-achieving students. The current study aimed to examine whether students' learning opportunities were differentiated as a function of class average achievement levels in a context where students use digital devices for literacy learning. Classroom observations were conducted in 62 New Zealand primary schools (Year 4–8), and the teaching and learning activities were compared between classes with different average achievement levels. Results showed that classes with high and low average achievement levels at the beginning of the school year had some differences in teachers’ instructional practices and student learning activities offered. In particular, students from classes with lower average achievement tended to experience instruction with tighter constraints that provided less autonomy in their learning. The potential implications of differential opportunities to learn for schools seeking more equitable outcomes through digital provision are discussed.

The Use of Miro in Teaching Practice

The COVID-19 pandemic has hugely affected our lives, including the daily work of university students and teachers. However, such difficulties can emerge as drivers for change to discover new pedagogical possibilities. Miro is a tool which can help students and teachers cope with the challenges faced during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this critical reflection, I will explore my experience of using Miro in a digital project created on the website of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Warwick in 2022. The major aim behind this reflection is to show how Miro can be used as a novel way of engaging with students in a physical classroom or virtual spaces. The article discusses using the versatile digital platform Miro as a pedagogical tool for motivating students’ creativity in composition or literature classrooms. The key question that my reflection seeks to answer is ‘how can teachers use Miro to increase student engagement and consequently adapt to the modern and post-pandemic needs of education?’ It is expected that this reflection will deepen both teachers’ and students’ knowledge of Miro as well as provide teachers with a new tool and method for online teaching.

Writing instruction for social justice: an investigation into the components of a teacher preparation course

AbstractFuture teachers must notice, navigate, and address ideologies in order to counter inequities in the literacy classroom. This article presents the findings of two teacher educators who have taken up the call to critically reflect on their own underlying beliefs and discourses regarding writing instruction. Through an education design framework, they analysed important components of the course, arguing for a higher degree of visibility of the ideologies and social forces that impact writing instruction. They found that despite encouraging a fairly complex and all‐encompassing view of learning to write to the future teachers in their course, the creativity discourse was present passively and the socio‐political was downright absent, despite clear social justice aims in the course. They discuss how well‐established discourses can serve as gateways to embed the socio‐political into the course and address more granularly the question of exclusion through selected mentor texts.

Enhancing children’s early language and emergent literacy in a Greek pre-kindergarten heritage language classroom through a translingual and transcultural stance

This paper examines children’s early language and emergent literacy in a Greek pre-kindergarten heritage language classroom. It proposes a translingual and transcultural stance to language and language learning and illustrates how children articulate understandings of their texts with personal resonances.
 Cet article examine le langage précoce et la littéracie émergente des enfants dans un groupe de crèche de langue grecque comme langue d’origine. Il propose une approche translinguistique et transculturelle de la langue et de l'apprentissage des langues et illustre comment les enfants articulent la compréhension de leurs textes avec des résonances personnelles.

Critical literacy supplementary materials in high school EFL

Abstract Building on the concept of Freirean culture circles, this study reports on the development of supplementary materials to incorporate critical literacy into high school EFL textbooks. Collaborating with two experienced high school EFL teachers in South Korea, critical supplementary materials were developed to compensate for the speaking sections of Korean high school EFL textbooks. Teacher interviews, classroom interactions, and students’ surveys revealed five key elements of critical materials that were necessary for students’ critical engagement, namely: framing, safer topics, critical questions, critical vocabulary, and writing before speaking. This study shows that critical materials enable teachers’ critical literacy teaching practices, helping teachers deal with the dilemma between what is feasible and the principles of critical literacy. With classroom-based examples and discussions, this article offers insights to ELT teachers, materials developers, and teacher educators who strive to promote critical literacy in skill-based ELT classrooms.

Reorienting curriculum materials as agents of restorative justice in early literacy classrooms

Amidst numerous curricular reforms across the USA that censor reading materials and promote standardized literacy policies, the authors ask in this article: What rights do early childhood teachers and students have in curriculum-making, and to the very materiality of their own classrooms? More broadly, they wonder: How do material regulations in US schools impact the curricular work of restorative justice in early literacy classrooms? The authors examine one curriculum material used in classrooms across the USA, using theories of materiality to explain its orientation, disorientation, and reorientation within discourses around anti-critical race theory and pro-“science of reading” legislation. Moreover, they aim to explore the potentialities of curricula as agents of restorative justice and, consequently, the threats to justice from the disorientations expressed around specific curriculum materials.

Teaching Literature during a Pandemic-Induced Empathy Deficit

Abstract These notes from the field describe one instructor's experience with adopting a narrative medicine-informed pedagogy in the literature classroom during the COVID-19 outbreak. It examines how the chronic stress of surviving through a pandemic can contribute to an international “empathy deficit” and how an attitude of receptivity and co-intentionality—paired with reading fictional stories about health and illness—can buoy the empathy reserves of both students and teachers.

Exploring critical media health literacy (CMHL) in the online classroom

Critical media health literacy (CMHL) is concerned with identifying healthrelated messages in the media, acknowledging the potential effects on health behaviours, critically analyzing the content of the message, and the subsequent application of the message to one’s health behaviours (Levin-Zamir & Bertschi, 2018). This exploratory research examined the CMHL skills of students (n = 120) in an entry-level, online asynchronous health and wellness course, by examining their ability to think critically about health-related themes presented in news media articles online and apply course-based knowledge during a Twitter event. Employing a content analysis of tweets from the event, students were found to illustrate CMHL skills when interacting with peers on Twitter, more than when directly assessing online news media. The findings suggest that the course curriculum be altered to include CMHL skills, to better equip students with the ability to identify accurate health information in the media.

Kindergarten Teachers' Perception on the Extent of the Usage of Teaching Listening Strategies in Relation to Classroom Literacy Environment

Kindergarten Teachers' Perception on the Extent of the Usage of Teaching Listening Strategies in Relation to Classroom Literacy Environment

Media and information literacy (MIL) in library classrooms: Content analysis of news evaluative criteria in instructional worksheets and checklists

This research aims to analyze the evaluative criteria the U.S. academic librarians employ in their instructional worksheets and checklists to understand how academic librarians teach media and information literacy (MIL)-related content. The study employs content analysis as a primary method to analyze these evaluative criteria and finds that academic librarians in the U.S. are mainly concerned with information literacy concepts while teaching news literacy topics (i.e., fake news, disinformation) and select criteria that revolve around the authority of sources (i.e., “authorship” and “quality of supporting evidence”) while media literacy concepts (i.e., “representation”) go vastly unrecognized.