I watch my eighteen-month old daughter talking to the soft-bodied doll that I have made her. I wonder what she sees in the undefined cloth face. I wonder if she will make a similar doll for her child one day and I wonder if she will wonder as I do. While the repetition across generations of early childhood experience is both common sense and much…

In this personal reflection, Sonia Nieto recounts the lessons she learned about language and literacy from learning to speak Spanish and then English; to reading and writing; and the impact of these lessons on her identity, teaching, research, and life; and, more broadly, on the fields of education and literacy.

Rosenak's "Teaching Jewish Values" (1986) is perhaps his most accessible book about Jewish education. After diagnosing the "diseases" of Jewish education, he endorses "teaching Jewish values" as the curricular strategy most likely to succeed given the chasm which divides traditional Jewish subject matter and the…

This reflective-narrative essay ponders and explains effective strategies employed by the author in his own second language classroom. He cultivated the skills, talents, and ideas of his own students by blending various strategies and methods that clearly define the standards and meet the demands of modern literature education. All situations and…

Responds to Robert Slavin's unfavorable evaluation of mastery learning by advocating a wide variety of learning methods and strategies. Mentions a recent paper discussing the need for mastery learning improvements, initial prerequisites, a supportive home environment, reading automaticity, and teaching higher mental processes. (MLH)

Discusses the how many and how much lesson (how many people can acquire the rudiments of education, and how much they can learn), and the how few and how little lesson (how few of us assimilate the educational experience, and how little of the distillate consciously affects our decisions and actions). (CT)

Several major issues related to parent participation are described in the comments of over 1,000 teachers who responded to a survey regarding their practices in the area of parent involvement. Eight issues that may prompt new research in this area are identified. (MP)

Classifies the different language interactions that occur in the school and home, ranging from those that give the child or learner the power to make language choices to those that control the child's use of language. (HTH)

Shyness is a general term used for behavior that has several different bases. Ten to fifteen percent of children are born with predisposition to shyness. There are two main types of shy children: those who are temperamentally shy from birth, which is evident by their second birthdays, and those who don't become shy from birth until a few years…

This essay investigates what identity politics may have to contribute to the reformation of Marxist theories of education through considering how it would theorize the practice of explicitly critical pedagogy. (IAH)

Suggests that teachers examine the assets of natural language in children's homes for implications for language instruction at school. Discusses a children's story that can be interpreted as an analogy with instructional implications for creating natural language contexts in the classroom. (HTH)

To solve problems of causality and measurement in educational research, this paper combines seven variables into a proposed model of educational productivity on achievement tests. The authors first review psychological models of educational production that relate learning to aptitude and environment, and note that these models do not allow for…

Essays in this special issue of the "Journal of Family History" focus on the teaching of family history by using artifacts. The articles were written by the staff at Old Sturbridge Village (OSV). The first article discusses how family history is taught at OSV. Students study a real family using demographic information and artifacts such as…

Beginning with a brief history of homeschooling in America, this paper discusses literature describing today's population of homeschoolers. Although older, the binary typology offered by Van Galen (1987, 1991) to categorize the motivations of homeschoolers is still utilized in much of the homeschooling literature. Van Galen breaks homeschoolers…

Proposes teaching only language arts for three years for children from poor families who do not emphasize reading. Suggests methods including teacher and student story telling; story reading; practicing letter formations; singing or talking along with records or videotapes; discussing word meanings; reading poetry; and story writing with corrected…