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Against the backdrop of China’s curriculum reform, this paper explores how a Chinese lesson study (CLS) of English literature instruction in a senior high school promotes the teacher participant’s professional development (PD) in teacher beliefs and emotions, teaching contents, teaching approaches and learner outcomes.

This study adopted the CLS approach to explore the teacher participant, Lily’s PD. Three rounds of CLS of short fiction instruction were conducted. Triangulated data including interviews, reflection journals, discussion notes and lesson materials were collected for directed qualitative content analysis.

The results show that through the CLS, Lily has (1) changed her beliefs about the curriculum and literature instruction, and improved her emotion management and become more resilient and motivated; (2) shifted her teaching focus from forms and facts to meanings; (3) adopted a more learner-centred and inquiry-based teaching approach and (4) received satisfactory learner outcomes including increased learner participation and quality output. The follow-up class observations suggest the sustainability of such development.

This study applies and validates a conceptual framework of teachers’ PD, and establishes the value of promoting curriculum reform and facilitating EFL teachers’ PD through CLS and literature instruction.

This study aims to explore how teachers changed literature instruction in English language arts (ELA) classrooms following personal loss, and identifies factors influencing those changes. The author argues teachers regulated their responses to literature according to emotional rules they perceived to be associated with the teaching profession. Understanding teachers’ responses helps educators, teacher educators and educational researchers consider what conditions and supports may be required for teachers and students to share emotions related to loss in authentic ways in ELA classrooms.

To examine changes teachers made in literature instruction following personal loss, the author conducted a thematic analysis of 80 questionnaire responses.

The author found teachers changed literature instruction related to three areas: teachers’ relationship to students, teachers’ instruction surrounding texts and teachers’ reader responses. Responses highlighted how teachers adhered to emotional rules, including a perception of teachers as authorities and caretakers of children. Teachers considered literature instruction to require maintaining focus on texts, and avoided emotional response unless it aided textual comprehension.

Scholars have argued for literature instruction inclusive of both loss experiences and also emotional response, with particular focus on students’ loss experiences. This study focuses on teachers’ experiences and responses to literature following loss, highlighting factors that influence, and at times inhibit, teachers’ authentic sharing of experiences and emotions. The author argues teachers require support to bring loss experiences into literature instruction as they navigate emotional response within the relational dynamics of the classroom.

The following is an annotated list of materials that discuss the ways in which librarians can provide library users with orientation to facilities and services, and instruct them in library information and computer skills. This is RSR's 11th annual review of this literature, and covers publications from 1984. A few items from 1983 have been included because of their significance, and because they were not available for review last year. Several items were not annotated because the compiler was unable to secure them.

This study aims to explore the perceived barriers that a secondary English teacher faced when attempting to discuss racial injustice through young adult literature in Mississippi.

The authors rely on Critical Whiteness Studies and qualitative methods to explore the following research question: What are the barriers that a White ELA teacher perceives when teaching about racial injustice through The Hate U Give?

The authors found that there were several perceived barriers to discussing modern racial injustice in the Mississippi ELA classroom. The participating teacher indicated the following barriers: a lack of racial literacy, fears of discomfort and an urge to avoid politics.

Much has been written about the urgent need for antiracist teaching practices in secondary English classes. This article explores the barriers a white ELA teacher perceived when attempting to discuss modern racial injustice through literature instruction in a white context of the “four pandemics” (Ladson-Billings, 2021).

From book challenges to anti–critical race theory and anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning legislation, US English teachers have been on the receiving end of a considerable amount of far-right conservative pushback. This study aims to explore the effects of conservative pushback on individual English teachers and their classroom practice. What pushbacks have individual English teachers faced? How has pushback impacted their teaching? What strategies have they developed for navigating pushback?

This qualitative study explores secondary English teachers’ reported experiences with conservative backlash as reported in 15 semi-structured interviews conducted between May 2022 and August 2023.

Participants reported feeling the pressure of increased levels of pushback, and many reported censoring their book selections to avoid additional public scrutiny. At the same time, they also described a range of strategies they have developed for protecting themselves and their practice, such as codifying curriculum, increasing transparency, formalizing review processes for challenging books and strengthening their resolve to resist.

This study offers a timely window on a pressing problem affecting the daily practice of English teachers in the USA.

Combining empirical insights from two lesson studies (LSs), this research aims to investigate EnEFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ development in understanding and practical skills regarding the recent national English curriculum reform in China. It also strives to incorporate students’ performance and perceptions in the evaluation of the effectiveness of these LSs and teachers’ development.

Two LSs were conducted in the same school with 3 years in between. Standardized procedures were followed in the two LSs, including pre-LS interviews, talk-lesson session, rehearsal lessons, and one public lesson. Triangulated data were collected from lesson plans, reflective journals, discussion notes, and interviews to probe into teachers’ learning and development. Students’ task performance and perceptions were analyzed to help reexamine the influence of teachers’ development on student learning.

The teachers in the two LSs encountered similar problems in both understanding and implementing the curriculum reform. The LSs helped them reach a contextualized understanding of the key concepts. Besides, developments were also seen in their instructional skills to adopt innovative methods and activities. The students’ task performance and perceptions endorsed the teachers’ efforts.

First, this research combines data from two standardized LSs at different periods of curriculum implementation in the Chinese EFL context, which provides insights into teachers’ difficulties and development regarding curriculum reforms on a longer timeline. Second, students’ performance and perceptions are included as important data sources to assess the effectiveness of the LSs and teachers’ development.

WHETHER the political pendulum is to swing in the direction of the Right or not in the coming year we do not know. Local electors are not the only key to national ones whatever politicians may argue. That there will be a move towards that direction is probable as our people tire of the monotonies of any government. Any change will not affect libraries greatly at present as the world problems are too pressing to allow any practical discussion of domestic ones. Our only fear is that “economy” may become a cry, which means, of course, the lopping of things which are educational, cultural and otherwise not money‐making and it is only too probable that public libraries and indeed other libraries might suffer from the modern equivalent of the Geddes axe which some are hopefully expecting. On the other hand the strength of the organizations which control wages from below is such that the disastrous “cuts” of the first Geddes experiment are not likely to be repeated. And on wages the whole of our financial tructure rests. Moreover libraries have now assumed the right to exist in adequate condition and to displace them may not be so easy as it was thirty years ago; but, nevertheless on vigilance our safety still depends. The conditions are not likely at present to be propitious to any real advance. The much‐desired new Library Bill is being drafted—and should be—but its hearing does not seem imminent; the chances of building new libraries are bleak, and even repairs are to some librarians a nightmare. Confronting all these conditions is the greatly increased use of libraries which is reflected in every kind of public, university, national and commercial library. This strengthens faith in the future in spite of the immediate prospect.

MANY of the parish and community libraries of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were subscription libraries, as this was the best way for people of limited means to amass and maintain reasonable collections, but it was not always so. When William Ewart and his colleagues met to consider the problem of public libraries in 1849, they interviewed John Imray, a civil engineer who had seen several parochial and village libraries in the north of Aberdeenshire. The cross‐examination by Ewart began as follows:

The purpose of this paper is to provide an annotated bibliography of resources on the topic of academic librarians collaborating with English composition faculty and instructors for the implementation of information literacy instruction into English composition courses.

In order to find relevant resources for the bibliography, the author consulted a library catalog, the WorldCat database, to find books not available in the local library, and databases to find journal articles. Databases consulted include a general database, an information science‐related database, and a library and information science‐related database.

Whenever librarians collaborate with English composition faculty for information literacy, students' information literacy skills are improved.

This bibliography is limited to the time period 1998‐2007. Articles and books published before 1998 are not included. Also, popular magazines articles and newspapers articles are not included.

This paper will be helpful to academic librarians who want to collaborate with English composition faculty members for information literacy instruction. Several examples of this type of collaboration are provided.

This paper is a useful contribution on this topic to the library literature. Particularly, it contributes to the library literature pertaining to information literacy. Also, a database search indicates that this paper is the first annotated bibliography on its topic.

A thematic focus on identity has for years been a mainstay of secondary school literature curricula. Typical curricular units engage students in questions related to what it means to come of age and to develop an integrated sense of individual identity in the face of societal pressures toward conformity. This common thematic focus relies on conventional theories of identity as static, located in the individual, and linked to an autonomous self. Further, this focus positions adolescents as incomplete people, lacking fully formed identities. Current sociocultural theories of identity, however, understand identity as multiple, fluid, performed, and shaped by cultural histories and social contexts. Identity, in this view is always in process. Adolescents are fully formed people with identities that are no more or less complete than those of anyone else. Such a view of identity requires a more complex and nuanced conceptualization of adolescents, their capabilities, and their interactions with texts than does an individual view of identity. In this chapter, we outline a framework for identity focused literature instruction that relies on sociocultural understandings of identity, then draw on illustrations from classroom research to explore three key ways that an identity-focused approach challenges current approaches to pre-service teacher education related to literature instruction. Specifically, we explore challenges to the ways that we teach teachers to select and evaluate literary texts, plan literature instruction, and engage in inquiry and dialogue with students.