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University educators have observed the concurrent problems of student attrition, higher than normal or desired failure rates and students struggling to complete assessable and non-assessable work, for instance, set readings. Recent public commentary has pointed to the widening participation agenda with its lowering of university entrance scores and consequent increase in university places as factors contributing to the problem: many students are entering university without the preparation or dispositions that helped their predecessors succeed. University teachers are at the coalface of this problem. These teachers do not set entrance scores or course caps but are tasked with supporting an increasingly diverse student population. This article offers a case study: a university teacher's encounter with a university's Key Accountability Measures around failure and attrition, and offers a teaching response to this policy. In response to these changing conditions, The Reading Lab was designed as a large-group learning and teaching activity in the form of a series of interactive lectures devoted to the practices of reading. The Lab sessions sought to address a problem that many scholarship-of-reading researchers have communicated: our university students are often not resilient readers and as a result often do not complete set readings. This article evaluates what the Reading Lab achieved (and failed to achieve). For instance, if it is possible (in the current climate) that the failure and attrition rates might never radically improve, how can teaching and learning activities be more positively directed towards the student experience, for even minor gains in the inclusion and the retention of students?

We are colleagues and collaborators working in the field of English Literary Studies, broadly defined. This paper reflects on our collective encounters working as Life Writing scholars within the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA). Specifically, we muse autocritically on our experience of organising an online conference at a time when scholars are still experiencing the impact of the pandemic. We propose the term 'field culture' to describe and draw attention to the ways in which an academic field is shaped by socio-cultural practices that impact on the kind of knowledge and researcher identities produced within the field. We explore the 'field culture' of IABA and its conferences and posit that our research collective is an example of the ways in which academia might be made more accessible for early-career researchers, for those less able to travel to conferences. Reflecting on a series of aims and strategies for the conference, we also make a case for supporting creative practice and creative interventions in life writing as a discipline in which the politics of genre blurring and pushing boundaries has been foundational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a special issue of the journal International Research in Children's Literature that focuses on representations of children and war. The selected articles cover a range of topics, including revisionist histories, marginalized texts, and children's voices. The articles explore various perspectives and experiences of children during war, such as the relationships between Poland and Ukraine, child-animal relationships in times of conflict, Yugoslav socialist literature for children, narratives of female child soldiers in Africa, espionage in children's literature during World War I, Jewish refugee child diarists, and the recontextualization of fairy tales to process the Holocaust. The authors argue for the importance of these stories and the need to listen to and record children's experiences and narratives in history. [Extracted from the article]

This article considers our experiences teaching a hybrid literature/creative writing subject called "Life Writing." We consider the value of literature students engaging in creative writing practice--in this instance, the nonfiction subgenre of life writing--as part of their critical literary studies. We argue that in practicing life writing, our literature students are exposed to and gain wider perspective on the practical, critical, creative, and ethical issues that arise from working with literary texts. Such an approach is not with risk. As we discuss in this article, life writing texts can often narrate difficult or traumatic material. However, we want to show how life writing, with its particular focus on actual lives and lived experience, creates a particularly conducive ethical, intellectual, and creative space for learning about and practicing writing.

In this reflection I discuss my experiences teaching E. M. Forster's canonical novel "The Longest Journey" (1907) to third-year university students. I argue that there are a multitude of benefits in employing queer pedagogies for teaching English. I consider how queer pedagogies might go beyond questions of representations and visibility and promote 'queer' methodologies for reading that are diverse, student-centred, focus on questions rather than answers.

Marjane Satrapi's 2003 graphic memoir Persepolis is a coming-of-age story set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. 19 years after its publication, at a time when we are witnessing increased cultural displacement across the globe, Persepolis's representation of an adolescence lived across and between cultures feels as insightful and provocative as ever. Satrapi explores Marjane's childhood development as she grows into adolescence and experiments with identities. In Persepolis, Marjane's coming-of-age does not result in her becoming comfortable or fixed in a particular identity (or identities) but represents Marjane's acceptance of her liminal and marginal status in the various cultures she occupies. Marjane is shown to be engaged in an ongoing journey through identity formations that does not end when the memoir does. In this essay, we consider the chapter titled 'The Cigarette' from Persepolis to explore how Satrapi develops a narrative style and an aesthetic for representing a liminal adolescent experience. Through her use of an episodic structure; simple, graphic repetition; and dialogic and multivocal encounters between the child and adult self and the protagonist and her mother, Satrapi shows the complex negotiations with 'the self' that characterise her coming-of-age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings recent debates in literary studies regarding the practice of close reading into conversation with Derek Attridge's idea of "readerly hospitality" (2004) to diagnose the problem of students in undergraduate literary studies programme not completing set reading. We argue that the method of close reading depends on encouraging students to foster positive affective responses towards difficulty--semiotic, emotional and intellectual. Drawing on trials of teaching methods in literary studies' classrooms in four universities in Australia, we suggest that introducing students to the concept of "readerly hospitality"--rather than assuming an appreciation of difficulty--can better prepare students for the encounters they will have in set literary texts and strengthen the effectiveness of classroom teaching.

This paper introduces the concept of "reading resilience": students' ability to read and interpret complex and demanding literary texts by drawing on advanced, engaged, critical reading skills. Reading resilience is a means for rethinking the place and pedagogies of close reading in the contemporary literary studies classroom. Our research was across four Australian universities and the first study of its kind in the Australian context. We trialled three working strategies to support students to become consistent and skilled readers, and to equip teachers with methods for coaching reading: "setting the scene" for reading, surveying students on their reading experiences and habits, and rewarding reading within assessment. We argue that the nature and pedagogy of close reading has not been interrogated as much as it should be and that the building of reading resilience is less about modelling or outlining best practice for close reading (as has traditionally been thought) and more about deploying contextual, student-centred teaching and learning strategies around reading. The goal is to encourage students to develop a broad suite of skills and knowledge around reading that will equip them long term (for the university and beyond). We measured the effectiveness of our strategies through seeking formal and informal student feedback, and through students' demonstration of skills and knowledge within assessment.

In this article we discuss our experiences of team teaching via 'emergency remote teaching' a hybrid literature/creative writing subject, 'Life Writing', during 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic. We explore how a focus on concepts and issues foundational to life writing as a discipline provided unique points of engagement at a challenging time for students. We discuss our experiences via case studies ranging from object life writing to YouTube and biography. The article explains our methods and how we approached with extra sensitivity the fact of challenging conditions affecting student lives and learning during this time. We found that our students showed strong evidence of deep engagement with the subject and its learning activities and assessments. Through participation, the students showed high-level comprehension and produced relevant and authentic work. The context resulted in learning and teaching that was necessarily personal and allowed students to show their knowledge of life narrative through an engagement with theory and personal practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Planned retirements and demographic trends suggest a crisis for community college leadership in the near future. This article describes a recently initiated program to develop current and future leaders in [...]