English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Power Of Poetry In Building Classroom Community, Chris Peck

The Utah English Journal

I stood in front of my class of sophomores, paper in hand, ready to share a poem with them. They had grown used to me sharing poems by that point. At the start of each class, I would stand in front of them and read aloud a poem written by one of many famous poets. However, this day was different. We were starting a new unit—poetry—and I had high expectations for my students. I had toiled with how best to teach poetry to those whose only exposure to poetry consisted of Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, or Shakespeare. There is …

Turning Over A New “Moon” For Twilight, Georgina Dibble

The Utah English Journal

This year Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight is celebrating 13 years, which seems unbelievable to me because I still remember so clearly experiencing the craze that swept over my middle school when it was released. I can remember my 11-year-old baby doll t-shirt wearing, side bangs bobby-pinned back self, reading that first book in 2005. It completely captivated me. And not just me but every girl in my school. Even then I could feel just how cringey some of the melodramatic scenes were to read, there was nothing better than getting to dive into a story with a group of girls and …

Book Review: 180 Days: Two Teachers And The Quest To Engage And Empower Adolescents, Megan Russell

The Utah English Journal

The blank calendar of 180 days, an ominous cavern of white space, stares back up at me, challenging me to fill its space with productive, interesting lessons for an entire year. As with many new teachers, I have experienced some trepidation with planning out an entire year of school, and so as any English graduate would, I turned to the source that has never let me down: literature.

Politics, Eugenics, And Yeats’S Radio Broadcasts, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

Much has been written about the right-wing politics and eugenicist sympathies of Yeats’s late-1930s poetry in general and about On the Boiler in particular. Yeats’s focus on Ireland’s degeneration and his calls for its regeneration through cultural (and even biological methods) coincided with his dalliance with the Irish Blueshirts and his frustrations with the transformations of the Irish Free State under Éamon de Valera. However, these years also proved to be Yeats’s most active in terms of radio broadcasting, with six of his nine broadcasts made between 1937 and 1938. In this essay, I read Yeats’s broadcasts, in particular “In …

Genres: Moving Toward Authenticity, Deborah Dean

The Utah English Journal

Writing in a new genre can be tricky. When we teach students a new genre, we often begin by exposing them to the genre by reading multiple mentor texts and helping them identify the salient features. This is a practice supported by many current writers in our field today, including Gallagher & Kittle (2018), Dean (2017), and Marchetti & O’Dell (2015), among others. When we teach academic genres (the kinds of writing common in schools such as research papers, literary analysis, and reports), we often provide additional help by providing students with more specific directions or scaffolds, such as forms …

Promoting Secd Through Literary Character Analysis, Cindy D'On Jones

The Utah English Journal

As Ms. Lingli stands before her adolescent English students, she knows they face increasing challenges in today’s society. She is well aware of the growing number of adolescent youths who describe experiencing feelings of isolation, a lack of understanding from others, low self-control, and disengagement (Earl, Meijen, Passfield, & Taylor, 2017). Ms. Lingli also realizes that as an English language arts teacher, she can play a unique role in helping her students develop competencies to navigate these challenges by integrating social and emotional competency development (SECD) through literary character analysis.

Finding The Right Books For The Right Students: An Appeal For Independent Reading Time In The English Classroom, Tara Pearce

The Utah English Journal

During Teacher Appreciation week, students often are coerced into writing notes to teachers. Sometimes it is a well-meaning office staff person that makes it happen, or sometimes, a selfless, fellow teacher, trying to do a good turn for their colleagues. In one particularly stirring note that I received myself, the student wrote only my name, and signed her name. I guess she figured that the template already stated, “Thank you! You are an amazing teacher!!” and that should suffice.

Book Review: Facing Frederick: The Life Of Frederick Douglass, Laura Jackson

The Utah English Journal

You know the students who need a lot of pictures to really spell out a story for them? The struggling reader who needs a book to show not tell? The ones who are inquisitive and need to see things for themselves? The curious yet cautious reader who needs material that excites that curiosity? The ones who want to go down a rabbit hole to learn everything they can about something? The brainiac reader who needs more because they simply cannot learn enough on topics of interest? There are students such as these in every class you’ll teach every year of …

“What’S The Point?”: Creating Authenticity & Relevance Through Simulated Writing Experiences, Dawan Coombs, Jon Balzotti, Derek Hansen

The Utah English Journal

A few years ago, during a high school English course for struggling readers and writers, Brandon, a 16-year old junior in the class, detailed why he felt English class seemed so difficult. He explained, “I don’t really see the point of why I have to take it. I wish they taught me something that I’ll need in my adulthood, you know?” Knowing Brandon’s professional goals included studying business and eventually taking over his father’s local store, the answer to Brandon’s question seemed obvious: the critical reading and argument writing skills he was learning in English were precisely what he would …

Book Review: The Hate U Give, Kara Trammell

The Utah English Journal

The title The Hate U Give, creates the acronym THUG and is loosely based off of an album written by Tupac. The main protagonist relates to Tupac, just as her inner struggle is relatable for teenagers today. While books like To Kill A Mockingbird and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry delve into the racial issues that our nation struggled with in the 1930s and 40s, The Hate U Give would be another great source for high school teachers looking to modernize discussions of race and discrimination.

Strengths And Strategies: Creating An Engaging Ela Classroom, Rachel Bellamy

The Utah English Journal

I found the first classroom I could call my own in a virtual high school. From my experiences floating around every level of education, the one constant I found is that engagement is key in any classroom. I quickly learned that engaging students can be particularly challenging in a virtual classroom, especially in a world where most teaching degrees provide tools for brick and mortar teaching. Over the last five years I have learned many techniques for adapting to a virtual setting. I am also surprised, looking back, that many virtual engagement strategies are equally useful in a traditional classroom …

Book Review: Dare To Disappoint, Jessica L. Reschke

The Utah English Journal

From living amongst government unrest to dreaming of becoming an actress, in Dare to Disappoint Özge Smanci illustrates what it was like to grow up in Turkey. Özge tells her autobiography through the form of a graphic novel, using text and drawings to express how she saw the world at different stages of her life in this coming-of-age story.

Book Review: They Both Die At The End, Courtney Jones

The Utah English Journal

Mateo Torrerez only knows one thing for certain. He is going to die today. Mateo has spent the last eighteen years in fear of this very day, hiding out in his apartment, hoping to avoid the day that Death-Cast, a company able to accurately predict the day you will die, would call. People have tried for years to run, hide, or fight death after the call, but by the end of the twentyfour hours, Death-Cast has always been right. Now that Mateo has received his call he realizes, to his horror, that he has never truly lived.

Book Review: A Novel Approach: Whole-Class Novels, Student-Centered Teaching, And Choice, Tara Piña

The Utah English Journal

Are you team whole-class novel? Or team workshop method? In the seemingly inconclusive battle between the two camps, Kate Roberts’s A Novel Approach: Whole-Class Novels, Student-Centered Teaching, and Choice finally brings the answer: you can be both. Roberts’s book offers a practical guide to implementing a blended learning environment where teachers can harness the community building and guided structure of whole class novels with the choice and engaging freedom of independent reading.

Poem No. 120, November 2018, Huntsville Literary Association (Huntsvile, Ala.)

POEM

The Huntsville Literary Association was founded in 1967 to provide a community for writers, readers, and artists through workshops, readings, and educational programs. One of their key contributions is the literary magazine titled POEM which showcases original writings from both established and emerging writers. This issue features poems from various writers.

Symposium On Science Fiction And The Climate Crisis, Gerry Canavan, Chan Kit-Sze Amy, Moritz Ingerwersen, Meolody Jue, Hua Li, Patrick D. Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Steven Shaviro, Vandana Singh, Imre Szeman, Wong Kin Yuen

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Representations Of Women In The Literature Of The U.S.-Mexico War, Janel M. Simons

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines figures of women as represented in the literature of the U.S.-Mexico war in order to think through the ways in which the border conflict was preserved in nineteenth-century U.S. American collective memory. Central to my dissertation is a consideration of the intersections of history, myth, legend, and fiction in the memorialization of this war. This dissertation demonstrates that a close look at fictionalized accounts of women’s experiences of and roles in the U.S.-Mexico war highlights the ways in which historical fictions influence how we remember this moment of our collective past.

Focusing on popular accounts of the …

Patriarchal Ecocide: An Ecofeminist Reading Of Rahul Varma's Bhopal And Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy Of The People, Rania M Rafik Khalil

English Language and Literature

Ecofeminism is a movement that sees a connection between the exploitation of the natural world and the subordination of women. This concept of ecology and feminism conceptualized by Simone de Beauvoir (1952) and later refined by Francoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 has greened artistic values across disciplines, it is however perceived to be found only sparsely in drama. Una Chaudhuri (1994) and Theresa J. May (2005) argue that theatre is both “immediate and communal” (May 85) with a wealth of productions that “awaken ecological sensibilities” (85) and contest “industrialisation’s animus against nature” (24). Within this context, Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of …

Literary Analysis Assignment [Composition], Tuli Chatterji

Open Educational Resources

This assignment was used in English 102 Writing through Literature course and was designed to meet LaGuardia’s Inquiry and Problem Solving Core Competency and Written Communication Ability. Students were expected to critically reflect on issues-- such as water crisis, migration--addressed in Linda Sue Park’s novel A Long Walk to Water (2010) and then explore those issues in a global context, for instance, water crisis in Rajasthan, India, or migration from Central America to USA. Discussions prior to the assignment prepared students to study the literary text, both as an end in itself and as a bridge to other academic disciplines. …

Ecofeminism And Cultural Ecology: A Framework Of Connections And Intersections For Reading Margret Atwood’S “Habitation”, “The City Planners”, “Morning In The Burned House”, “February”, And “ Night Poem”, Maha M. Munib Abdelmotaleb

English Language and Literature

Cultural ecology and Ecofeminism are two concepts that intersect with each other. Both concepts define and reinforce each other. It could be claimed that, Ecofeminism is one manifestation of cultural ecology since the former tackles issues about feminism’s relationship with nature including nature domination and the duality of nature which find their echoes in cultural ecology as well. The whole idea of the earth’s subjugation and male domination as well as the male/ female duality of nature in general find resonance in feminist resistance to patriarchal domination which develop under the umbrella of Ecofeminism to be part of the struggle …