Knowledge in the Making: Challenging the Text in the Classroom

For a better understanding of the ways in which classrooms can be influenced by current developments in literary and cultural theory, Corcoran, Hayhoe, and Pradl have gathered an international collection of essays.

Knowledge in the Making provides a variety of ideas on how teachers of literature at all levels, working with both the young and the mature, can bring readers and texts closer together in their classrooms. Drawing upon the continuing critical advances of reader-response and resistance theory, the teachers who have contributed essays to this volume show ways to encourage students to become secure and active readers. Strategies are offered to help students question what they find as they read, and then question what it is about themselves as individuals and members of communities that contributes to their responses.

Teachers will find a lively mix of theory and practice that will revitalize their own encounters in the literature classroom. The three editors use their experiences working with literature teachers to organize the chapters under five themes that address central issues in the teaching of literature.

BILL CORCORAN is head of the School of Language and Literacy Education at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He has taught in secondary schools throughout Australia and Canada. For over five years he has been editor of English in Australia, the national journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.Michael Hayhoe is senior fellow in the School of Education at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. He has published numerous books and articles, and conducted lectures and workshops internationally on a wide range of aspects of teaching English, especially those to do with encouraging active approaches to literature. He was a member of the International Poetry Response Project.GORDON M. PRADL, a professor of English education at New York University, has taught junior and senior high school and served on the editorial board of the Harvard Educational Review.