Minding the aesthetic: The place of the literary in education and research.

The article discusses the significance of aesthetic as a mode of cognition and means of social cohesion. It notes the relation of aesthetic knowledge with the perception or intuition, the emergence of such awareness into something durable and the response to the embodiment. It describes the evolution of aesthetic delight in the human species, the sense of sense of beauty arising on one's realization of the formal qualities of something, through the poem presented by the author on achievement

Fifth Brigade at Verrieres Ridge

The Fifth Canadian Infantry Brigade arrived in France on 16 July 1944 during the worst days of the battle of Normandy. The Allies had expected heavy losses on the D-Day beaches and then, once through the Atlantic Wall, lighter casualties in a war of rapid movement. The opposite had happened. The coastal defences had been quickly breached, but then there were only slow movement and horrendous casualties. In one month more than 40,000 U.S. troops were killed, wounded or missing, while almost 38,000 British and Canadian troops shared the same fate. The Allied air forces enjoyed total air superiority over the battlefield, but in June alone the cost was 6,200 aircrew. Soldiers on both sides were beginning to say that it was 1914–1918 all over again—a static battle of attrition with gains measured in yards and thousands of dead

Migrants, Media and Cultural Politics in China

A review of Wanning Sun, Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York and London, 2014

Editorial: The professional content knowledge of the English/literacy teacher: Addressing the implications of diversity

When this topic was mooted by the journal editors, it was seen as having two parts: 1. The professional content knowledge of the English/literacy teacher, and 2. The implications of this “knowledge construction” for classrooms that in many places are becoming increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse. We saw ourselves as wanting to provide an opportunity to revisit themes raised in two early issues of English Teaching: Practice and Critique. In the inaugural issue of the journal (1:1; November 2002), members of the newly established Editorial Board and others shared a personalised account of the “state of English (Language Arts)” in their respective constituencies. The overriding question was: “What is it like to be an English teacher right now in this time and place?

Book review: "A Tingling Catch": A century of NZ cricket poems 1864-2009.

The article reviews the book "A Tingling Catch: A Century of NZ Cricket Poems 1864-2009," edited by Mark Pirie

English teaching in New Zealand: The current play of the state

Curriculum, assessment and qualifications reforms in New Zealand have wrought significant changes in the construction of English as a subject and in the practices of English teachers. While the content of the new English curriculum suggests continuities with past syllabuses, its structural parameters indicate a different discursive agenda. Reforms in senior secondary school qualifications have also acted to construct English in ways that need to be contested and which may be making the subject less responsive to changes in textual practice resulting from the rise in digital technologisation. In a variety of ways, the reforms are also serving to reshape the everyday classroom practices of English teachers, both overtly and covertly through a process of discursive colonisation. Because the reforms have been highly centralised, state initiated and state managed, they have posed a huge challenge to teacher professionalism and identity. Through all of this, the hegemonic status of English as the vehicle through which literature is studied remains unchallenged. The article concludes by listing five challenges to English teachers