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Drawing from the literature and the historical fiction-based feminist antimilitarist research I conducted in writing my debut novel, "A Sea of Spectres." This article discusses the what and why of fiction-based research. I detail how to: (a) move from inspiration to fiction-based research; (b) frame the research; (c) develop research questions; (d) and embed theory and data in the story through applying the craft of fiction writing. My aim with fiction-based research is to create compelling characters situated in historical and contemporary settings in order to draw readers into engaging and accessible stories that help them learn about themselves, their understandings of others, and their relationships to society. I conclude with recommendations for conducting fiction-based research; delve into the methodology of fiction-based research; study the craft of writing fiction; read in related genre(s); abide by the ethics of fiction and fiction-based research; and learn about the fiction publishing process.

Several authors have underlined the negative consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in several populations, including medical students, such as increases in anxiety, depression and burnout symptoms. Furthermore, previous studies showed that anxiety and depressive symptoms are positively associated with affective empathy and negatively associated with cognitive empathy. Given the adverse pandemic effects highlighted by several authors, the present study sought to determine whether medical students' empathy has been potentially impacted, with higher affective empathy and lower cognitive empathy score in the pandemic cohort compared to pre-pandemic cohorts. Medical students (n = 395) were recruited during the COVID-19 pandemic and completed the "Interpersonal Reactivity Index" (IRI) and the "Basic Empathy Scale" (BES). This cohort was then compared with two pre-pandemic cohorts (one used the BES [n = 1168], and the other used the IRI [n = 342]). Similar results were found on both scales: the pandemic cohort displayed significantly higher scores in affective empathy and personal distress (affective empathy domain) and, surprisingly, significant higher scores in cognitive empathy, fantasy, and perspective-taking (cognitive empathy domains). As stressed by previous studies, we posited that the higher scores in affective empathy, personal distress, and fantasy might indicate emotional difficulties. The paper concludes with the identification of empathy components that should be promoted in the curriculum of medical students.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine how young people imagine civic futures through speculative fiction writing about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The authors argue that young people's speculative fiction writing about AI not only helps make visible the ways they imagine the impacts of emerging technologies and the modes of collective action available for leveraging, resisting or countering them but also the frictions and fissures between the two. Design/methodology/approach: This practitioner research study used data from student artifacts (speculative fiction stories, prewriting and relevant unit work) as well as classroom fieldnotes. The authors used inductive coding to identify emergent patterns in the ways young people wrote about AI and civics, as well as deductive coding using digital civic ecologies framework. Findings: The findings of this study spotlight both the breadth of intractable civic concerns that young people associate with AI, as well as the limitations of the civic frameworks for imagining political interventions to these challenges. Importantly, they also indicate that the process of speculative writing itself can help reconcile this disjuncture by opening space to dwell in, rather than resolve, the tensions between "the speculative" and the "civic." Practical implications: Teachers might use speculative fiction writing and the digital civic ecologies framework to support students in critically examining possible AI futures and effective civic actions within them. Originality/value: Speculative fiction writing offers an avenue for students to analyze the growing civic concerns posed by emerging platform technologies like AI.

This paper combines social fiction and academic analysis to envision hopeful futures for higher education. At the heart of the exploration is Phoebe Wagner's speculative fiction piece, "University, Speaking," which personifies a university grappling with environmental, political, and social change. Phoebe Wagner's first-person narrative highlights the power of collective voice, the importance of centering community, and the urgent need to cultivate resilience and adaptability. Through analysis of key themes, this paper connects Phoebe Wagner's fictional vision to contemporary research on the multi-faceted and complex challenges facing universities today. By integrating artistic and academic perspectives, this paper discusses new possibilities for universities navigating disruption and change.

This qualitative study explored the relationship between creativity, time, age, and the literary world among 16 award-winning Israeli writers in the second half of their lives. Based on data collected through in-depth interviews with the participants, the findings indicate that the writers' creativity in the second half of life was linked to "Preservation, Growth," and "Decline," leading to four interrelated dimensions: (a) preserving youth through creativity, (b) enhancing creativity over time, (c) navigating creativity, acclaim, and ageism, and (d) managing creativity amidst a changing world. The study found that the writers' creativity was enhanced over time, as they gained experience and developed their skills. However, some writers experienced a decline in stamina or their ability to write long novels. The study also found that the writers' experiences of acceptance from the literary world and the audience changed over time. Some writers continued to receive acclaim and attention, while others experienced ageism and a decline in the audience's interest in their work.

Framed by decolonial theory, this paper explores how language and literacy ideologies, including Anglonormativity, or the expectation that children should be proficient in a standardised version of English and are deficient if not, shape language and literacy practices in South African classrooms. While not legitimised, the use of fluid language practices in classroom discourse in the Global South is well documented. Less explored is the impact of language ideologies on children's written text production. Using the tools of linguistic ethnography, I focus on the literacy practices emergent bilingual children are engaged with in a Natural Science lesson in year 4, the first year of their transition from 'home language' language of instruction (LOI) to monolingual English LOI. A close analysis of the practice of learners making notes in the lesson shows a pretextual gap between the expectations of the activity: that the children will be proficient in the 'English' used for note-making as well as orthography and layout conventions of written notes, and the heterographic writing they are able to produce. I examine the written products of note-making against a contested history of the use of African languages for writing fiction, and the exclusion of African languages from formal education, thus within a context of coloniality of language. I argue that the concept of "ukuzilanda" can inspire the expansion of literacies in African languages in education, enabling us to build from an existing literate and oral tradition.

Historical fiction is a powerful genre for inviting children into meaningful conversations centered on the lived experiences of others. Historical inquiry immerses readers in interdisciplinary research experiences and complements language arts Common Core State Standards that call for a balance of fiction and non-fiction text. Antiracist lenses enhance inquiry conversations and help students articulate nuanced understandings of the fictionalized historical events while developing disciplinary and racial literacy knowledge necessary for humanizing history. This article highlights how we, as teacher educators, use historical fiction to engage teacher candidates in inquiry-based social studies lessons to develop their disciplinary and racial literacy skills and practices. Then, we offer an example of how to integrate the C3 inquiry approach using Finding Langston (Cline-Ransome, 2018), a historical fiction text set during the Great Migration, to engage elementary-aged readers in explorations of history, sparking children's agency and engagement in their own learning.

Sixty percent of Indigenous people in Canada live rurally and on reserve but are largely absent among young adult and middle-grade fiction. This critical content analysis examines representations of the land and rural places and Indigenous identities in Canadian award-winning fiction written by Indigenous authors for young adult and middle-grade readers. By positioning land, place, and rural Indigenous youth identities and experiences at the center of the analysis, the study contradicts dominant colonizing perspectives of "rural" and "Indigenous" that undervalue and/or disregard the lives, knowledge, and perspectives of rural Indigenous community members. Critical content analysis makes visible the books' complex representations of rural land and identities where Indigenous characters are agentic, resilient, and adaptable in the face of settler colonialism.

This article aims to uncover how alignment affects second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition by Chinese-speaking learners of English as they interact with various interaction loads (i.e. input text, peers and video). It also explores how tasks with varying interactional intensity in relation to the interaction loads influence the alignment magnitude and vocabulary learning outcomes. To this end, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, three groups of L2 learners were instructed to learn and use the target words while performing paraphrase, summary or continuation task. The results indicated that task-induced interactional intensity had robust effects on alignment magnitude as well as receptive and productive lexical knowledge. In Study 2, three groups of L2 learners were asked to complete a continuation task while interacting with high-proficiency peers (HL group), low-proficiency peers (LL group) or with both low-proficiency peers & video (LLM group). The results showed that interacting with high-proficiency partners had positive impact on alignment magnitude and lexical knowledge, but video exerted only a limited effect. The findings afforded evidence for the 'interaction-alignment-learning' research route and accounted for vocabulary acquisition from a new perspective.

This multiple case study traced how secondary preservice social studies teachers grappled with understanding race/racism in their reading of the novel, All American Boys. Participants, all self-identified as white, consisted of two cohorts of students who attended a large midwestern university and were enrolled in an advanced social studies methods course. Drawing on notions of racial civic literacy, we analyzed participants' responses to the novel, especially as it related to the police officer character who committed racial violence on an unarmed Black youth. We asked whether the officer's actions were racist. Findings showed that participants reacted to the officer's actions in three ways: calling-out race/ism, justifying his actions, and distancing from making judgments. Participants who called out Officer Galluzzo's actions as racism saw this character as symbolic of larger systemic issues in society, whereas those who sought to justify Galluzzo's actions demonstrated faith in public institutions, such as policing and the court system. Finally, those who distanced themselves claimed to be in a space of neutrality. Results of the study suggest that faith in public institutions, often considered a hallmark of the civic mission of schooling, may be at odds with fostering racial civic literacy.

U.S. libraries and classrooms are under siege by private and governmental entities working to simultaneously ban/remove justice-focused literature and inundate these spaces with reactionary/ultra-conservative materials. It is within this educational crisis that we conducted a critical content analysis of the award-winning, best-selling historical fiction series, "Rush Revere: Time Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans" by Rush Limbaugh. The analysis worked to answer two central research questions: How does the "Rush Revere" series promote white lies about U.S. history? and What curricular violence is enacted through the "Rush Revere" series? Findings illuminate how each book individually centralizes an aspect of white supremacy exceptionalism, capitalism, militarism, patriotism, paternalism - that collectively then creates the infrastructure to indoctrinate young readers into white supremacist ideology.

Although philosophers have long claimed that reading fiction has the potential to improve imaginative capacities, empirical evidence on this topic is limited. We report an experiment that aims to conceptually replicate and extend previous work by Djikic and colleagues by testing whether reading literary fiction reduces the need for closure, and by testing for the first time whether it enhances openness to experience, cognitive complexity, imaginability, and divergent thinking. We also examined whether a potential fiction-based impact depends on previous exposure to print fiction or nonfiction. In a between-subjects design, N = 111 higher education students were randomly assigned to read either two literary fiction short stories or two nonfictional essays. Outcome variables were assessed after the reading assignments using a battery of questionnaire-based and behavioral indicators. The two groups of readers did not differ on any outcome measure, and results were not influenced by lifetime exposure to written fiction or nonfiction. Taken together, the current findings do not support the assumption that reading literary fiction increases imaginative capacities or related outcomes.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a two-phase intervention programme meant to reinforce comprehension of the structural framework of stories among 92 preschool children (aged 4-6 years) over 4 months. During the first phase, the children were called upon to produce their own original stories following the "Story Grammar" pattern, while in the second phase, based on their previous training on the structural framework of stories, they were trained to produce digital stories using the web2 tool "StoryJumper." Both phases of the intervention programme included a combination of verbal and visual aids. The quantitative analysis of the data showed that the intervention programme significantly improved children's ability to comprehend the structural elements of stories and to create organized, comprehensible stories. Following our expectations, the children's new knowledge on the structure of stories was transferred to their digital creations. The implementation of the intervention programme helped substantive questions emerge about the formation of a multi-level strategy which would effectively support the transfer of knowledge and skills from a traditional to a digital environment through processes that are meaningful for children.

Interactive Fiction (IF)--a digital form of non-linear narrative writing--requires readers to respond, to make choices that shape their reading experience. I argue that such choices can be put to use in the classroom, helping teachers to facilitate metalinguistic talk. In this article, I offer a clear conceptualisation of metalinguistic talk, drawing upon existing research to create a useful framework comprised of four characteristics. Using this framework, and with reference to interview data and field notes, I analyse and consider two transcripts of classroom talk in order to explore the extent to which a particular work of IF enabled me to facilitate metalinguistic talk with a class of 16-17-year-old English Literature students. The lesson in question formed part of an action research project exploring the possibilities for IF in the secondary school English classroom. I argue that the choices contained within "A Great Gatsby," a work of IF which I designed via a process of critical-creative textual intervention and using Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" as my source material, can help to scaffold metalinguistic talk--conversations "about" language.

While ChatGPT has recently become very popular, AI has a long history and philosophy. This paper intends to explore the promises and pitfalls of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) AI and potentially future technologies by adopting a speculative methodology. Speculative future narratives with a specific focus on educational contexts are provided in an attempt to identify emerging themes and discuss their implications for education in the 21st century. Affordances of (using) AI in Education (AIEd) and possible adverse effects are identified and discussed which emerge from the narratives. It is argued that now is the best of times to define human vs AI contribution to education because AI can accomplish more and more educational activities that used to be the prerogative of human educators. Therefore, it is imperative to rethink the respective roles of technology and human educators in education with a future-oriented mindset.

This study examined written/formal register based on happilyever-after women's fiction conventional blurbs. In particular, the 80 blurbs were equally divided into two types: the classic and mass-marketed. Biber et al. (2021) was used as the framework to extract features to respond to the two research questions: What were the top written/formal features among the classic and mass-marketed happily-ever-after women's novel blurbs? And, which blurb type displayed more resemblance to written/formal register? The functional framework comprised three main groups of features: The passives, adjectivals and adverbials. Results revealed that the first two showed a strong tendency towards written/formal register while the last seemed to show the opposite but was taken here to be in-between features, corresponding to fiction language. The top written/formal features based on the two types of blurbs were the passives (both the full and reduced forms) (26%), full relative clauses (23%), full adverbial clauses (20%) and attributives (13%). The blurb type that seemed inclined towards written/formal nature more was the classic, as substantiated by five salient features: the passives, attributives, -en adjectivals, -ing adverbials and -en adverbials. It is believed that discourse analysts and ESL/EFL teachers can pay more attention to these useful syntactic features, particularly the full and reduced forms, as ways to compress information in formal writing.

Superhero themes have been increasingly used in the teaching of a range of topics including business, humanities and science in recent years. Typically, characters from existing popular media are adopted for the teaching activities. On the other hand, customised characters that are developed from scratch allow the educator to have more control of the characters' features so that the learning objectives can be achieved more effectively. In this work, new fictitious characters have been created as cases for students to perform their engineering materials selection assignment. The motivation for using the superhero theme was to increase the students' excitement in the assignment. This paper shares the approach taken and the teaching experience after running the superhero theme with two cohorts of students.

Scholars from various disciplines have theorized a relationship between reading fiction and empathy. Research in cognitive studies suggests that understanding fiction requires Theory of Mind, or the cognitive ability to understand the feelings and motivations of others. Some studies build on this research to suggest reading fiction helps to promote empathy, while others posit that more empathetic individuals are more likely to enjoy reading fiction. Education scholars have drawn on this conflicting research base to suggest that the use of young adult literature in the classroom can help promote student empathy. The few studies that have examined the relationship between young adult literature and empathy have focused primarily on adult rather than adolescent populations. This literature review finds that studies in education that posit a link between empathy and the reading of young adult literature cannot support that link as they rely on a limited research base, imprecise definitions of empathy, and divergent pedagogical approaches. Recommendations for classroom literature instruction engaging empathy are provided.

All human decision-making is based on different expectations and assumptions about the future. Futures literacy, consisting of knowledge, emotions, and skills, is an essential competency for the 21st century. Educational steering documents, as the Finnish national curriculum, state that the teachers shall scaffold the students in problem solving, critical thinking and into a sustainable lifestyle now and in the future. The task is complex and challenging for the teachers. In this study a Storyline project was used as a frame for learning about sustainable living. The aim of the study was to study how students' perceptions of sustainable futures are visualized through the Storyline project and the meta-reflective dialogue. The research material consists of recorded group interviews with primary school students. The results of the thematic analysis show that different ecological skills, ecological concepts, and entities related to ecological sustainability, as well as cause-and-effect descriptions related to science, are present in the students' descriptions of the future. As emotional skills, students bring out empathy; empathy both for other people and for plants and animals. Students rely on their own competence to involve in sustainable development and as resources they highlight e.g. technological innovations, the importance of scientific knowledge, circular economy thinking as well as learning skills and social skills.

This paper contributes to a research program within extensive reading (ER) and "Reading in a Foreign Language" using corpora to simulate ER input to develop vocabulary through incidental learning to 9,000 words. This helps researchers/teachers evaluate ER. If corpora indicate no 'pathway' from smaller to larger vocabulary sizes through authentic ER input, with vocabulary recurrence rates sufficient for incidental learning, then graded readers or other pedagogy appear essential. Studies offer different conclusions due to modeling issues. This study replicates previous research on a larger corpus of general fiction, with improved modeling. For every vocabulary size, a substantial amount of comprehensible fiction is found, with enough repetition of vocabulary from subsequent levels that pathways from smaller to larger vocabulary sizes are possible without graded readers. Prior estimates of approximately 3 years to acquire 9,000 words at 1 hour a day are underestimates, with modeling indicating 2 hours a day would be required.

This paper attempts to provide a new understanding of the gutter and how it is used to significant effect in Gene Luen Yang's, Boxers & Saints. This research draws upon the work of Scott McCloud to establish a framework for the theoretical applications of the gutter. Most prior research focuses on the gutter within the page. This article demonstrates how Yang pushes the concept of the gutter further by creating a new type of gutter that moves beyond the pages and across texts. Then the research attempts to demonstrate how the idea of the textual gutter heightens the transnational elements that define Boxers & Saints.

This article focused on the voice of resistance and activism in Imbolo Mbue's "How Beautiful We Were" (2021). The novel voices the environmental injustices and the disastrous consequences of oil corporations. The people of Kosawa know that something is wrong with the land they're living on. They receive acid rain, rivers have grown sickly green, and people are dizzy with the diseases. They also know that Pexton, the oil company is to blame for their loss of life and livelihood. The natives decide to rise up and fight back against an American Oil Company that has been polluting the land. This study investigated how this ecological destruction in Kosawa has triggered eco-activism and resistance from the natives. The study used the qualitative approach employing an analytical research design comprising research methods of content analysis and close textual reading. The research was further informed by Lawrence Buell's (2005) second wave of eco-criticism, which advocates for environmental justice for the victims of environmental degradation. It is also concerned about the destruction of plants and animals. This study depicts ecocriticism as a theory that displays the tools of activism and resistance. The findings of this research show that oil spillage has shattering effects on humans, animals, and aquatic life. The findings also show that the author uses various resistance approaches to fight against environmental degradation such as media, education, revolution, and age mates among others. Mbue's text calls on the African nations to vehemently resist environmental degradation.

In this article we attempt to envision what utopian higher education could be given the realities that currently shape students' experiences. Postsecondary education is fraught with admissions that favor those with social, cultural, and economic capital; with course enrollment, class size, and instructor accessibility governed by bureaucratic labyrinths and austerity measures; and with major and career selection constrained by looming student debt. As higher education perpetually reproduces social stratification and increasingly mimics corporate practices, it is imperative to ask who and what higher education is for. Why do we continue to engage in it? Are there ways to salvage it from within, or does it require demolishing, clearing the rubble, and building from scratch? Can a utopian version of higher education exist at all if wider social relations endure? Using speculative fiction, this piece grapples with re-envisioning higher education as students' daily lives, and the world at large, remain within the confines of capitalist realism.

Representations of higher education in fiction-based sources contribute to forming public perceptions of academia, and so are a form of public pedagogy. Within popular culture representations, understandings of academics are constructed using particular tropes which build shared meanings of the profession. Conferences are one of these tropes and can thus be used as a focus to explore the construction of the academic profession in popular culture representations of higher education. This paper draws on a research project which explored representations of conferences in narrative fiction texts (novels, graphic novels, short stories). In this paper, we analyse references to conferences for what they teach us about the academic profession. The paper is based on analysis of 98 symbolic references to conferences from a sample of 23 fictional texts. Symbolic references are short references which serve as a shorthand to signal aspects of the academic profession, and in this paper, they have been analysed in terms of what they portray and where they position the reader. The paper argues that popular culture representations of academia are pedagogical, in that they show the profession to be desirable to others but encourage a disidentification with academics, reinforcing the exclusionary nature of the profession.

The paper describes an upper-division university course in Mars literature taught online since Fall 2013. The course readings comprise six novels relating to Mars. Authors include H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Phillip K. Dick, Greg Bear, and Kim Stanley Robinson. After an introduction, sections of the paper discuss course organization and syllabus, Americanist conceptual approaches, anti-colonialism, habitat sustainability, and pedagogical possibilities for future discussion of Mars literature. The paper argues for a fiction-based approach to understanding historical and potential future relationships with Mars and Mars science.

Recent biological research (Trewavas, 2003; Mancuso & Viola, 2013; Gagliano, 2018) has (re)demonstrated the variety and complexity of the adaptive behaviour of plants. In parallel with these findings, and in acknowledgement of the important role played by plants in the biosphere and climate of the planet, the representation of plants in philosophy, arts and literature has become an object of study within the environmental humanities. In response to the rapidly developing field of critical plant studies, the representation of plants in literatures for children and young adults are now accumulating. Even as the number of studies is increasing, there is as yet no cohesive framework for the analysis of plant representation in children's literature. This article addresses this gap. Inspired by the Nature-in-Culture Matrix, an analytical figure that provides an overarching schema for ecocritical analysis of children's texts and cultures (see Goga et al., 2018), this article presents an analytical framework for plant-oriented analysis, the Phyto-Analysis Map. This map has been developed with reference to central concepts from the field of critical plant studies, and its usefulness is elucidated through literary examples. Developed with children's fiction in mind, the map also has potential application with children's non-fiction, which often employs fictional textual techniques.

In her influential work "Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction," Waugh (1984) loosely categorizes literary metafiction on a sliding scale of four metafictional Acts. Through repeated readings of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (Carroll & Tenniel, 1866) and study of all of "Wonderland" editions across time, I noted that artists move the book across Waugh's scale of Acts through the visual narrative of illustration. In the essay that follows, I trace the development of metafiction in "Wonderland" by curating (Persohn, 2018, 2021) a collection of illustrations across time that demonstrates turning points and exemplars of how the book has evolved from the simplest forms of metafiction in Carroll and Tenniel's first edition to radical metafiction in more recent illustrators' works. This evolution evokes ontological questions about the thin distinctions between fiction and reality.

Wattpad platform has reached a significant number of users in Turkey as well as in the world. Therefore, books written in Turkish on Wattpad are essential reference sources for researchers to determine the transformation and development of Turkish and popular literature in the digital environment. The tags are keywords assigned by the author and contain valuable information about the general characteristics of a book. The browse categories when sorted by hot listing option, give a popularity ranking of a category at the current time. Tags enable the readers to discover the book more easily and provides the book to be ranked on top of the popularity rankings. In this study, from the tags that are obtained from the top 10 books of popularity rankings of a 13-year-old user profile, it is aimed to analyze the subjects of interest of adolescent readers, their choices and the quality of the Turkish books that appeal to them. The tags are classified and it was determined that the most used tags among the classified groups were related to the genre of the story, the subject of the story, and the K-pop culture, respectively. This shows the effect of K-pop culture in Turkish books on Wattpad. It is also seen that words related to kinship and affinity names, professions and occupational names, media and social media communication tools, mature themes, venues, supernatural, and mythological elements, Watty Awards, gender and age, religions, personal, physical and age characteristics of protagonists, and reign are used as tags.

The purposes of this paper are to investigate Taiwanese undergraduate students' responses to a selected fictional text, and to propose a critical intercultural pedagogical approach of reading global literature in the EFL educational context based on the insights from the research findings. The authors first critically analysed Xiaolu Guo's third novel, "A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers," in terms of Occidentalism, in order to unpack the ideologies underlying her representation of the British and the Chinese. The analysis of the text was conducted through a qualitative approach of critical content analysis. After that, a semi-structured interview was adopted to scrutinise Taiwanese undergraduate students' perceptions of the ideologies underlying the fiction. The analysis of the text identified three themes of British-Chinese binary opposition together with the juxtaposition of ethnocentric Occidentalism and reverse Occidentalism. The findings obtained from interviews indicated that two of the three dichotomies, i.e. individualism versus collectivism and cosmopolitan versus rooted, underlying the fictional text were commonly perceived by the interviewed undergraduates while they had diverse views on the second dichotomy, sexual freedom versus sexual reticence. Furthermore, some students? responses to the fiction signified a subtle, implicit and delicate form of reverse Occidentalism. Based on the above research findings, the authors configured a critical intercultural pedagogy for raising students' capability of decoding and deconstructing Occidentalist ideologies underlying global literature.

Several studies have shown that Swedish students' reading comprehension and ability to understand fiction are decreasing year by year. Numerous alarming reports point to the unsustainable situation concerning young people's reading engagement, but the ideas of how it can be remedied are few. This study aims to investigate and evaluate a didactic design that includes avatars as game elements in order to promote students' reading of fiction. What opportunities and challenges might such a design present? In the study, an action research method and game theory were used, where teachers and researchers collaboratively explored and evaluated the outcome. The results showed that this design offered many opportunities and generated reading engagement. The students co-design their learning by creating an avatar and then entering the fictional world of a short story. Creating an avatar that interacts with the fictional text requires both participation, reading comprehension and meta analytic skills. However, the design also presented challenges, that some students did not link their avatars clearly to the text and instead did their own stories. The design could thus be further developed to provide more room for avatars to interact more with the chosen literary environment.

This paper aims to analyze the concepts of the deictic shift theory and discourse theory of silencing. It has been written on the basis of synchronic descriptive method in the study of the English language. For this purpose we wish to introduce a theoretical framework for the study and then we hope to present the deictic shift theory and discourse theory of silencing, to show the development of a set of questions that any reader may use to evaluate a work of fiction. It is noted in the article that while using the language in the narrative, these questions help to guide the reader to determine the context of the narrative. These questions also help the reader to determine the narrator's point of view, his strategy for silencing characters, and discover which characters in the narrative have been silenced. It is stated in the article that deixis depends on context, situation, and relationship within a narrative and Deictic Shift Theory is a set of premises about readers and stories that grew out of research on the function of deixis in fictional narratives. The article also covers discussion of linguistic views of scientists in this field.

This study explored the reading interests, and preferences of educated Arabs such as students, faculty and professionals, the types and number of books they read before, during and after the Pandemic (between 2012 and 2022). Data were collected from Twitter threads, hashtags and surveys and responses to the question "What are you currently reading". The Twitter data analysis showed that the preferred book titles with the highest percentages were novels/fiction (31.5% before the Pandemic and 41.5% during the Pandemic); Islamic books (22.5% before the Pandemic and 12% after the Pandemic);(iii) self-development books (12.5% before the Pandemic and 20% during the Pandemic). 80.7% preferred to read paper books and 19.3% electronic books. In most surveys, between 50%-60% of the respondents do not read at all. In 2 surveys, between 76%-80% do not read. The highest number of books read was during the Pandemic as 32.5% read 5 books and 38.5% read more than 20 books. The status of reading after the Pandemic was like that before the Pandemic (43.4% did not read). Even graduate and undergraduate students. 31% of graduate and undergraduate students read nothing outside their course textbooks. For enhancing students' reading interests, preferences and the types and amounts of books read, the study recommended using book clubs, BookTok, encouraging students to visit libraries, using online courses, blogs, and mobile apps for discussing books read, integrating global topics in the school and college curriculum and others.

The present study proposes the integration of mobile fiction Apps (MFAs) in reading instruction to help EFL college students understand the form and content of literary works. It will give examples of fiction Apps that can be downloaded from the Google Play and iPhone App Stores, give the advantages of using MFAs, literary appreciation skills that can be developed with MFAs and instructional stages with MFAs. MFAs can be used as extension activities or as a supplement to in-class reading instruction in ESL/EFL. They are free, easy, and quick to download, update and delete, can be used anywhere, anytime and as many times as the students need. Instruction with smart mobile phones begins with downloading an MFA such as Harry Potter, Oliver Twist, Sherlock Holmes, Wuthering Heights, a novel by Agatha Christi or a collection of stories. Both simplified and original versions can be used depending on the student's proficiency level, story/novel length and difficulty level. A story/novel video, app or e-book can be used online or offline. Some MFAs provide notes and tests. The instructor can ask pre-questions that require the students to identify the plot, setting, characters, main theme, point of view, symbolism, style, and tone of the narrative, and infer the meanings of figurative language and imagery in the story. Questions and students' answers, summaries, comments on each other's' responses can be posted in an online discussion forum, blog or social media page. The students can discuss the elements of a literary work under the instructor's supervision. The integration of fiction Apps showed improved reading comprehension, literary appreciation and text analysis skills among participating students and increased their engagement in reading and literary analysis.

Prior to the 1990s, the term "arts integration" rarely--if ever--appeared in educational literature. The term may be new, but educators have been involving students in arts learning processes for centuries. In particular, teachers have long harnessed the power of drama to engage students in arts-integrated learning activities. Articles and books published between 1903 and 2018 reveal that student-written scripts comprised classroom learning activities in social studies, literature, and even science courses. Briefly contextualized in prevailing American educational ideologies, this research examines the history of the use of scriptwriting as an educational tool, sharing what teachers and students did, how they did it, how they described it, and why they endorse scriptwriting as a learning activity. The generations of teachers who authored the articles about their practices report academic and social benefits for their students as well as professional satisfaction for themselves. Their ideas, methods, topics, and insights may serve as validation and motivation for current educators. The goal of this research is to encourage today's educators by familiarizing them with the significant history of this work and challenging them to continue to promote and implement artistic ways of learning.

This paper reviews algorithmic or artificial intelligence (AI) bias in education technology, especially through the lenses of speculative fiction, speculative and liberatory design. It discusses the causes of the bias and reviews literature on various ways that algorithmic/AI bias manifests in education and in communities that are underrepresented in EdTech software development. While other recent work has responded to mainstream or private sector technology development, this review looks elsewhere where practitioners, artists, and activists engage underrepresented communities in brainstorming processes to identify and solve tough challenges. Their creative work includes films, toolkits, applications, prototypes and other physical artifacts, and other future-facing ideas that can provide guideposts for private sector development. Acknowledging the gaps in what has been studied, this paper proposes a different approach that includes speculative and liberatory design thinking, which can help developers better understand the educational and personal contexts of underrepresented groups. Early efforts to advocate for fairness and equity in AI and EdTech by groups such as the Algorithmic Justice League, the EdTech Equity Project, and EdSAFE AI Alliance is also explored.

In this article, we present reflections on the possible dialogs between literary creation and science teaching. Our considerations will be directed to the work of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the role of science and science education over the text that gave rise to the genre "science fiction." This work aims at presenting the possibilities of using Shelley's work in order to explore historical, methodological, conceptual, social, and political implications that may be useful for motivating reflection in teaching science in the classroom in times of "post-truth." In order to do this, we base our notes on the conceptions of Science, Technology, and Society (STS); in rationality and reasonability; in aspects of bioethics; and on the man-machine implications according to the scientific community in the educational field. In addition to the pedagogical mediation of concepts by the teacher, we seek to look at different strategies as alternatives for pedagogical action in science teaching, through dialog.

This paper shows how a significant, but short-lived, episode in Scotland's educational history--the rise and decline of Socialist Sunday Schools (SSSs) in the first half of the twentieth century--provoked controversial debates about issues that continue to have relevance today. The first half of the paper explains the origins of SSSs, their links to adult political groups, the form and content of their meetings, and publications designed to advance their agenda. It also describes the criticisms they received from religious leaders and Conservative politicians, on the grounds that they undermined faith and preached revolution. This leads into the second part, which considers whether SSSs might be regarded as agencies of indoctrination, promoting a version of citizenship that sought to subvert existing institutions and disrupt the social order. It is argued that complete neutrality in educational systems is not possible and that a study of the SSS movement has considerable potential as an educational resource, particularly for teachers of history, politics and social studies.

This case study examines how an experienced secondary ESL teacher's personal and professional history is linked to his curricular choices in the classroom and how his enactment of critical educator identity interacts with ideologies within society. The analysis of the focal teacher's experiences that remain prominent in autobiographical memory shows that his lived experiences of (re)learning Spanish and English, studying and teaching abroad and in California, and extensive reading influenced the cultivation of his identity as a critical educator. He designed a curriculum that used historical fiction and that evoked an approach to the mechanisms of ideological control both within the context of the chosen works of historical fiction and within students' lives. Yet, the situatedness of teacher identity exposed his identities to the influence of neoliberal educational policies and students' lack of interest in the curriculum and learning in general, jeopardizing his understanding of what to believe, how to act, and how to be. The findings of this study led us to theorize that the interplay of life histories, identities, practices, and contexts by using the notion of historicity.

The mysterious and unspoken secrets of life can be a source of fascination for young people. The bildungsroman quest for identity is often coupled with a protagonist's attempts to decode a range of secrets. Jamaica Kincaid's work of fiction, "Annie John" (1985), illustrates this journey. In this novel, the female protagonist's maturity and character development become possible only through her persistent efforts to decode the secrets of life. This paper discusses how, in a series of adventures, those secrets are embedded into Annie's story and how her coming-of-age mystery is ultimately resolved.

The article deals with the analysis of literary narrative where a possible unreal fictional world and a possible real fictional world usually coexist. When the norms of life plausibility are consciously violated, the real and the unreal possible worlds are emphatically opposed. Hence, their certain aspects are depicted in a fantastically exaggerated form. The interaction of possible worlds in a literary narrative destroys the stereotypes of the reader's perception. It can occur in different planes: structural (a shift of plot elements of the story, transformation, unusual, sharp turns of the borrowed plot, violations of a plotline); fictional (a combination of real and fantastic features in one image); temporal (violations of the chronological flow of time, a shift of time flow); spatial (expansion or contraction of space, magical spatial formations, displacements, deformations). By their nature, the interaction of different possible worlds can be continuous, partial, and fragmentary; resulting from their boundaries may overlap or be violated (entirely or partially). The continuous interaction of different possible worlds, destruction of their borders, although they do not disappear completely, make them largely blurred, interpenetrating each other. In the case of partial interaction of possible worlds, their boundaries intersect. In the case of fragmentary interaction of possible worlds, their common points are slightly visible, for example, only the borrowed title of a literary work or a character's name, or a fantastic concrete event or a place of the event.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention using indirect intergroup contact for improving intergroup attitudes in schools, in particular anti-Roma prejudice. Vicarious contact--a form of indirect intergroup contact--can be experienced through fictional book characters, who can serve as positive role models in terms of intergroup attitude improvement. A vicarious contact experiment was conducted with sixth grade students (N = 177) from three Slovak elementary schools, using passages from the Harry Potter series. A "three-group pretest-posttest design" was adopted; experimental condition 1 involved reading passages without subsequent discussion, experimental condition 2 involved reading the same passages followed by a discussion, while the control group was not involved in any activities. There was a significant improvement of intergroup attitudes in experimental condition 2 compared to the control group, while condition 1 did not show any such improvement. The first contribution of the study is in tackling conceptually distinct mediators of the intervention's effect--perspective taking and narrative transportation. The second contribution is in demonstrating the added value of discussion in interventions focused on prejudice reduction in schools.

When we considered how current sociopolitical events may impact experiences of girlhood today and remembered our own lived girlhood experiences, we came to the collective realization that we often turned to books as a way to make sense of our liminal experiences during girlhood. Given the sociopolitical moment in which we are living and considerations of the impact historical fiction had on our own navigation of girlhood, our author team wondered how historical fiction texts could help young readers to understand and navigate the liminal experiences of girlhood today. Building from these analyses of connections between the past and present in historical fiction literature, we interrogate girlhood across time to consider what readers might learn about contemporary girlhood from historical texts. Depictions of history often tend to be white-centric and to omit or deemphasize the histories and stories of other communities. Specifically, the lens of new historicism applied to portrayals of girlhood allowed for an examination of these portraits of girlhood in relation to historical context as well as power dynamics. This analysis broadens readers' notions of girlhood, both historically and in the present day, beyond white-centric conceptions.

This paper examines analyses of adolescent romance fiction, highlighting key themes and debates over time. I will argue that contemporary social conditions underline the need to reconsider the value of this genre in the secondary English classroom. However, working effectively with genre literature (including romance) requires educators to diversify reading practices, challenging the dominance of the standard 'class novel' approach. I will describe the integration of a module on teen romance into a literature course for preservice English educators. Finally, focusing on a specific text, "Frankly in Love" by David Yoon, I highlight the skilful way in which authors of contemporary adolescent literature weave multiple perspectives into engaging and nuanced narratives in which characters navigate identities, relationships, and ideas about love.

High-quality children's literature, including picturebooks, are important resources in the classroom for students to engage with complex and sometimes concerning contemporary issues. One strategy to involve students in learning about such issues is through the use of metafictive devices, which are literary stratagems that draw readers into knowing more about a topic and helping them understand and interpret them safely. In this paper, we analyse three selected texts that contain important and deliberate metafictive devices used by award-winning authors/illustrators. First, we share brief synopses of each book and then provide detailed analyses of the literary tools used by the authors, including how they support students' meaning-making practices through language and image. Then we consider how these works were used in a primary school classroom to improve children's critical multimodal literacies so that they became more discerning readers who could effectively cope and engage with complex and troubling world issues through literature.