There's a lot to love about this newly expanded book in the Picture-Perfect Science series: You can combine STEM and reading through appealing lessons that are just right for your second-grade students. Also, reading comprehension strategies are embedded in all 12 of the ready-to-teach lessons, 11 of which are updated and one brand-new. The goal…

In this article, Kate Collins begins by explaining how she discovered that "Hamilton: An American Musical," a Broadway show that incorporates a mix of musical genres: hip-hop, jazz, classic show tunes, and show-stopper numbers based on the life of Alexander Hamilton, could be brought into her teaching as a rich resource for her high…

This article describes a book review assignment that is an application of enlightenment practices to a modern learning environment. This paper encourages both student learning in the content of enlightenment ideas and the methods of critical, accessible writing. Students engage in metacognition by using the critical reasoning capacities of their…

This article gives an account of creating and delivering a (trans)disciplinary writing-intensive course focused on translation and translingual writing. The course, offered in a comparative literature program at a Canadian university, was co-created by an applied linguist, a literature professor, and a curriculum theorist, and was inspired in part…

Courses: This semester-long assignment can be featured in undergraduate or graduate communication courses that include a major writing assignment such as research methods, capstone classes, senior thesis sections, or advanced courses on topics such as interpersonal, intercultural, and interracial communication. This assignment is suitable for…

To challenge resistance to required literature courses, instructors quiz students regularly on the readings; they also require examinations that ask students to define key terms, to answer background questions focused on authors and dates, to identify key passages by author/title/speaker, and to explain the thematic significance of each quotation.…

The author describes two students creating narrative versions of an event from Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" to portray conflicts in characters' interactions to address the issue of sex abuse. Through rewriting events in texts, students gain a sense of how use of dialogue can serve to portray larger underlying tensions between…

In this article, the authors explore multimodal literacies and how they use literacy contracts and quadrants to help students to examine their identities via writing and the creative arts. A notable outcome of their joint efforts is that when teachers and students transacted with multimodal literacies, they showed value for their personal and…

Write first, talk second--it's a simple strategy, but one that's underused in literature classes, writes Paul Bambrick-Santoyo. The author describes a lesson on Shakespeare's Sonnet 65 conducted by a middle school English teacher, who incorporates writing as an important precursor to classroom discussion. By having students write about the poem…

Tinkering is a longstanding material practice that has gained popularity in recent years as a learning strategy at numerous schools, camps, and makerspaces. This article seeks to establish in composition pedagogy tinkering's playful, exploratory ethos by introducing a practice called "critical-creative tinkering." In critical-creative…

Fifth graders responded to a video of a picturebook,"The Red Tree" by Shaun Tan. They had not experienced explicit instruction in visual literacy and their responses served as a foundation for basic understanding of their analysis. We learned that they focused on four major areas: emotional aspects; visual qualities, summaries of the…

In Elizabeth A. Dagrosa Harris' high school English classroom, the writing assignment that inspires the most dread in her students is the literary criticism paper, a common assessment usually assigned in the second semester of the British literature curriculum. This assignment is grounded in solid and time-tested standards that describe research…

Writing is an essential part of a successful career in science. As such, many undergraduate science courses have begun to implement writing assignments that reflect "real-world" applications and focus on a critical analysis of current literature; these assignments are often in the form of a review or a research proposal. The…

This article challenges the predominance of modularization across the UK university system, arguing that the fragmentation of the learning experience which results from this model undermines the possibility of a disciplinary understanding. It proposes instead a practice of imaginative writing which, by engaging students' experience, interest and…

The objective of this paper is to share with other educators a teaching method that was developed to help graduate students, and potentially undergraduate students, understand how to properly reference and cite academic papers. In an attempt to teach rather than reprimand, a new teaching practice was developed for a graduate class at the…