Students are active in shaping the implementation of any curricular intervention. At Paradise Valley Unified School District (PVUSD), more than 1,500 students in Grades 1 to 6 were recipients of the William & Mary English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum units. In this article, we share students' perceptions related to the following three…

Seventh and 8th grade English-learners in selected urban schools will soon dive into some of the most celebrated speeches in U.S. history. They'll dissect, for example, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," and Robert F. Kennedy's "On the Death of Martin Luther King." Though their…

Bruner's constructs of learning, specifically the structure of learning, spiral curriculum, and discovery learning, in conjunction with the Cognitive Load Theory, are used to evaluate the Picture Word Inductive Model (PWIM), an inquiry-oriented inductive language arts strategy designed to teach K-6 children phonics and spelling. The PWIM reflects…

The author's career in professional education is intertwined with the history of language arts education in the United States and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The author joined NCTE in the 1960s, though she was already teaching for about 10 years with a well-developed constructivist perspective on teaching and learning.…

Collaboration and the appreciation for multiple perspectives have become increasingly important. The current political and economic condition in the United States and globally has exemplified the urgency for people of many different backgrounds and ideologies to work together to find solutions to world problems such as climate change and economic…

English language arts classrooms are especially rich sites for both explicit and implicit collaborations among those who inhabit those spaces. In these venues, Bakhtinian "heteroglot voices" (Bakhtin 278) saturate the oral and written discourse that students produce as they engage in discussions and as they write in a wide variety of genres,…

Place-based literacy learning is hardly an innovation in education and need not revolve around Native American legends. The objective of place-based literacy learning is to use local literacy artifacts to facilitate critical thinking about cultural, political-economic, and environmental connections to promote community sustainability by relating…

In this article, the author describes how she used integrated course design to design a course that would help special education teachers satisfy the "Highly Qualified Teacher" (HQT) requirement established by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in the area of English/language arts. The approach she chose was based on principles advanced by Fink…

Physical education is a prime content area for interdisciplinary learning. The movement components of physical education can be used as a medium through which children are provided with opportunities to practice and strengthen language skills. Cone, Werner, Cone, and Woods (1998, p. 4) agree: "interdisciplinary learning is an educational process…

Addresses the importance of preserving the integrity of music education when it is part of an interdisciplinary curriculum. Discusses how to connect different disciplines in the curriculum, while still preserving the content of music education. Presents three descriptions of how this can be achieved. (CMK)

While researchers have long advocated integrating disciplines, practitioners have sometimes viewed the combination of language arts and science for a particular purpose as unnatural and difficult to accomplish. An introductory section of this paper examines the underlying concepts for the integrated approach, that students learn based on what they…

Professors in a Communication Arts methods course for preservice and inservice elementary school teachers sought to move the content of the language arts curriculum from a direct instruction to a whole language model. A transformation came about as one professor realized that her efforts to enthusiastically convey the importance of authentic…

A practicum was designed to increase second-grade teachers' expertise and knowledge in integration of literature themes with writing and oral presentations. The problem addressed was that many students did not receive adequate support and opportunities to interconnect reading and original writing. There was nothing in the language arts series, nor…

Since 1984, the Language Arts Lab at Irmo High School (Columbia, South Carolina) has provided: (1) remediation in reading and writing to students with low standardized test scores; and (2) assistance to other students in the areas of study skills, college entrance exam preparation, term papers, reading and reading assignments, grammar, and…

The 26 articles in this annual on learning disabilities (LD) are organized into the following categories: research articles, educator resources, educational practices, creativity, professional insights, the LD experience of youth and adults, explaining LD to a child, and parents' trials and tribulations. The articles are: "National Institute…