This book about teachers as characters in popular media examines what can be learned from fictional teachers for the purposes of educating real teachers. Its aim is twofold: to examine the constructed figure of the teacher in film, television and text and to apply that examination in the context of teacher education. By exploring the teacher construct, readers are able to consider how popular fiction and film have influenced society’s understandings and views of classroom teachers. Organized around four main themes—Identifying with the Teacher Image; Constructing the Teacher with Content; Imaging the Teacher as Savior; The Teacher Construct as Commentary—the chapters examine the complicated mixture of fact, stereotype and misrepresentation that create the image of the teacher in the public eye today. This examination, in turn, allows teacher educators to use popular culture as curriculum. Using the fictional teacher as a text, preservice—and practicing—teachers can examine positive and negative (and often misleading) representations of teachers in order to develop as teachers themselves.

Thanks to the success of franchises such as The Hunger Games and Twilight, young adult literature has reached a new level of prominence and popularity. Teens and adults alike are drawn to the genre's coming-of-age themes, fast pacing, and vivid emotional portrayals. The essays in this volume suggest ways high school and college instructors can incorporate YA texts into courses in literature, education, library science, and general education. The first group of essays explores key issues in YA literature, situates works in cultural contexts, and addresses questions of text selection and censorship. The second section discusses a range of genres within YA literature, including both realistic and speculative fiction as well as verse narratives, comics, and film. The final section offers ideas for assignments, including interdisciplinary and digital projects, in a variety of courses.

Popular representations of teachers and teaching are easy to take for granted precisely because they are so accessible and pervasive. Our lives are intertextual in the way lived experiences overlap with the stories of others presented to us through mass media. It is this set of connected narratives that we bring into classrooms and into discussions of educational policy. In this day and time—with public education under siege by forces eager to deprofessionalize teaching and transfer public funds to benefit private enterprises—we ignore the dominant discourse about education and the patterns of representation that typify educator characters at our peril. This edited volume offers a fresh take on educator characters in popular culture and also includes important essays about media texts that have not been addressed adequately in the literature previously. The 15 chapters cover diverse forms from literary classics to iconic teacher movies to popular television to rock ‘n’ roll. Topics explored include pedagogy through the lenses of gender, sexuality, race, disability, politics, narrative archetypes, curriculum, teaching strategies, and liberatory praxis. The various perspectives represented in this volume come from scholars and practitioners of education at all levels of schooling. This book is especially timely in an era when public education in the United States is under assault from conservative political forces and undervalued by the general public. Contributors are: Steve Benton, Naeemah Clark, Kristy Liles Crawley, Elizabeth Currin, Mary M. Dalton, Jill Ewing Flynn, Chad E. Harris, Gary Kenton, Mark A. Lewis, Ian Parker Renga, Stephanie Schroeder, Roslin Smith, Jeff Spanke, and Andrew Wirth.

The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the work of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and critics who, reflecting on the realm of school experience, help to shape dominant ideas of school. The creations discussed are mostly stories for children and young adults. David Aitchison looks at serious novels for teens including Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Faiza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, the light-hearted, middle-grade fiction of Andrew Clements and Tommy Greenwald, and Malala Yousafzai’s autobiography for young readers, I Am Malala. He also responds to stories that take young people as their primary subjects in such novels as Sapphire’s Push and films including Battle Royale and Cooties. Though ranging widely in their accounts of young life, such stories betray a mounting sense of crisis in education around the world, especially in terms of equity (the extent to which students from diverse backgrounds have fair chances of receiving quality education) and empowerment (the extent to which diverse students are encouraged to gain strength, confidence, and selfhood as learners). Drawing particular attention to the influence of neoliberal initiatives on school experience, this book considers what it means when learning and success are measured more and more by entrepreneurship, competitive individualism, and marketplace gains. Attentive to the ways in which power structures, institutional routines, school spaces, and social relations operate in the contemporary school story, The School Story offers provocative insights into a genre that speaks profoundly to the increasingly precarious position of education in the twenty-first century.

Literature teaching remains central to the teaching of English around the world. This edited text brings together expert global figures under the banner of the International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE). The book captures a state-of-the-art snapshot of leading trends in current literature teaching, as well as detailing predicted trends for the future. The expert scholar and leading teacher contributors, coming from a wide range of countries with fascinatingly diverse approaches to literature teaching, cover a range of central and fundamental topics: literature and diversity; digital literatures; pedagogy and reader response; mother tongues; the business of reading; publishers, adolescent fiction and censorship; assessing responses to literature; the changing definitions of literature and multimodal texts. The collection reviews the consistently important place of literature in the education of young people and provides international evidence of its enduring value and contribution to education, resisting the functionalist and narrowly nationalist perspectives of misguided government authorities. International Perspectives on the Teaching of Literature in Schools will be of value to researchers, PhD students, literature scholars, practitioners, teacher educators, teachers and all those in the extensive academic community interested in English and literacy around the world.

This book examines representations of the teacher on stage - in both theatrical performances and dramatic text - in order to demonstrate how these representations have shaped society’s perceptions of educators in and out of the classroom. At the heart of this book is the interaction between theatre and teacher education. By considering how dramatic portrayals reimagine, reinforce and/or undermine our understanding of the teacher’s personal and professional roles, this volume bridges the gap between truth in dramatic literature and truth in the classroom. Chapters critically explore the personas embodied by fictional teachers in well-known works such as Educating Rita, School of Rock and The History Boys and illustrate how educators might use dramatic literature and performance to interrogate entrenched ideas about the student-teacher dynamic. By bringing together a diverse set of contributors from the fields of teacher education and theatre, this book takes a critical look at performance, text, society and culture to promote a new understanding of teaching and learning. This unique book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics and researchers in the fields of teacher education, drama and theatre education.

This book explores the narratives of girlhood in contemporary YA vampire fiction, bringing into the spotlight the genre’s radical, ambivalent, and contradictory visions of young femininity. Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska considers less-explored popular vampire series for girls, particularly those by P.C. and Kristin Cast and Richelle Mead, tracing the ways in which they engage in larger cultural conversations on girlhood in the Western world. Mapping the interactions between girl and vampire corporealities, delving into the unconventional tales of vampire romance and girl sexual expressions, examining the narratives of women and violence, and venturing into the uncanny vampire classroom to unmask its critique of present-day schooling, the volume offers a new perspective on the vampire genre and an engaging insight into the complexities of growing up a girl.

This book focuses on the multiple and diverse masculinities ‘at work’. Spanning both historical approaches to the rise of ‘profession’ as a marker of masculinity, and critical approaches to the current structures of management, employment and workplace hierarchy, the book questions what role masculinity plays in cultural understandings, affective experiences and mediatised representations of a professional ‘career’.

This collection explores the changing meaning and enactments of care in teacher education in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, from preservice teachers and teacher candidates to in-service teachers and education faculty. Over fifty international teacher educators explore the complicated concept of care in different content areas, learning contexts, and communities of learners, using different conceptual frameworks and methodological orientations. Throughout, this book situates research and reflection at the nexus of teacher education, care, and COVID-19 in order to reconstruct care in post-pandemic teacher education. Timely and incisive, this collection raises important questions and offers relevant examinations to consider how post-pandemic teacher education as a field will move forward in preparing and caring for those who will, in turn, care for their future students. The book is essential reading for teacher educators, scholars, and anyone interested in the notion of care in education.

This edited book includes chapters written by English Language Arts (ELA) teacher educators and practicing secondary teachers who examine their classroom experiences through an arts-based habit of mind. Rather than focusing exclusively on artistic approaches to ELA instruction, these chapters collectively frame the teaching of English Language Arts as an art in itself. As such, the arts-informed habits of mind discussed in this book refer more to sets of artistic dispositions than pedagogical methods. In their unique ways, each of these chapters argue that aesthetically charged ways of thinking allow preservice and practicing teachers to develop critical and creative thinking skills and purposely communicate, to recognize that individual beliefs and values are influenced by personal and social factors, and to set goals for their own learning as well as the learning of their future students’ learning.