The purpose of this narrative research is to examine cultural diversity among teacher candidates. A secondary purpose is to offer a pedagogical tool for teacher educators to use with their teacher candidates to help them develop a critical consciousness in their encounters with diverse students and their reflections on their own cultural…

Storytelling-based arts projects offer a universal and inclusive pedagogy; challenging prejudices, celebrating diversity and promoting tolerance and resilience in participants. In addition they assist in the development of receptive and expressive language skills, provide a credible basis for understanding folklore, cultural traditions and social…

Underscoring folklore's appropriateness to multicultural classroom settings are its connection with past and present cultures, its constancy and change, and its potential for oral transmission of human values. Most importantly, folktales and songs enable children to participate in the history of universal human emotions. To effectively include…

Classroom teachers might consider teaching children to become critical readers through the use of traditional literature. It is not necessarily difficult to define critical reading, but it is a difficult task to teach students when and how to read critically. The six skills most important to critical reading are that the reader should (1) read…

An individual folk anthology unit covering eight topics is described in this paper. The eight topics include (1) I have an identity, (2) my interesting name, (3) mandalas and sentences, (4) rhythms and rhymes of old times, (5) myths of my childhood, (6) folk legends/old and new, (7) aspects of folklore, and (8) slang. The activities accompanying…

One avenue for authentic exploration of different cultures is to incorporate folktales and folklore into early childhood curriculum. Universal themes are found as common threads in the folklore of many cultures, and folktales and folklore contribute to learning about each culture's rich heritage. Folklore and folktales teach young children about…

Compiles excerpts from two 1964 lectures that examine the use of folk and fairy tales for the teaching of prehistory, geography, and grammar. Provides a starting point for thinking about the power of literature as an integrating medium in the Montessori elementary classroom. (HTH)

Stories from oral tradition such as legends, myths, and fairy tales may more fully describe reality than any newscast for young children. As Bruno Bettelheim points out, stories meet the psychological need of all human children. The Yakima Indian legend "When Mosquitos Ate People" can be used in a flannel board story telling setting with young…

Sixteen experienced teachers of reading, from a large, northeastern, American university, were asked how, in their elementary classrooms, they would approach the story of Cinderella. This was done in an attempt to find out what conception teachers might have about the way texts could themselves teach children to negotiate meaning, how teachers saw…

Designed to give children a sense of the cultural heritage that fairy tales represent, this instructional unit was originally developed to motivate eighth-grade low-level readers and was later adapted for English as a second language classes and for a variety of elementary and secondary school learning levels. Objectives of the unit are to help…

Making repeated use of a traditional tale can offer various kinds of language practice. Many new teachers use a reading passage just once, investing considerable time in the explanation of the vocabulary needed to understand it, and then rush on to something new. Actually, the best potentialities of the material are still to be tapped, through…