Located in the suburbs of a large midwestern city, Trail Middle School serves a predominantly middle-class population. The data the authors feature in this article include group discussions and interviews with students, as well as recordings of in-class lessons, student work, and fieldnotes. The authors focus on the theme of gender as it emerged…

A recent community wide reading program offers a valuable opportunity for students and teachers to respond to literature by attending community wide events, creating art, and developing relationships with community members.

"Teaching Young Adult Literature" describes innovative methods for engaging students in reading, writing, and discussing contemporary and classic literary texts written for adolescents. Centered around the concept of change, the authors present YA novels that span across various disciplines. Each book presented will help students…

As a man of mystery, little is known about Titus Lucretius except that he was a 1st-century B.C.E. philosopher-poet who wrote an epic poem called "Of the Nature of Things" to explain the universe and people's place within it in strictly material terms. In the poem, Lucretius intertwines myths with scientific hypotheses to propose an Epicurean view…

Each year, seventh graders at Woodlawn School in Davidson, North Carolina, learn about Japan through a compilation of literature, history, and art. They are introduced to a wide range of ideas and materials: they study the Heian and Tokugawa Periods as well as modern Japan, the code of the samurai warriors, haiku and its components, and Japanese…

In this article, the author discusses how students create their arts projects by responding to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In creating their arts projects, students incorporate film, painting, performance, and other arts in their imaginative and innovative responses to Coleridge's classic work. The author discusses…

In this article, the authors offer an approach to teaching that can help students prepare to write for the workplace and in the community: a case study of community-based writing. In this case-study project, students work in groups to study the writing needs and practices of a community-based group or organization, such as a local public library,…

Suggests ways to improve students' visual literacy through the study of paintings and photographs. (DD)

Presents nine short pieces written by teachers describing how they relate the visual arts to language learning in their classrooms. (SR)

Describes a teacher's modern literature class, where she encourages her students to write freely and to create cubist or abstract works of art. Describes the students' progress and asserts that their attempts to search for insight without having definite, preset answers is enough to help them appreciate modern literature. (PRA)

Describes how a teacher integrates art and literature in teaching English and world literature, by using slide presentations of modern art to graphically demonstrate the characteristics of modernism--fragmentation, alienation, heightened subjectivity, narrative distancing, and discontinuity in time. Describes and relates specific works of Dali,…

Asserts that teachers of contemporary literature should enjoy the advantages of poetry written in response to, or interpreting, paintings or other works of art. Illustrates the advantages of such poetry with two examples. (PRA)

Describes a poetry-presentation assignment in which students select poems from examples studied in class and prepare oral presentations incorporating visual, dramatic, technical, or musical arts. Describes several student presentations resulting from this assignment. (MM)

To encourage creative thinking, high school teacher Kelly Courtney-Smith asked her students for creative responses to Hesse's novel, using a technique she learned from coauthor Michael Angelotti. Students painted or wrote poems interpreting their reading, then responded to the creations of their classmates. The students found that these…

Discusses the benefits of integrating the teaching of literature and painting. Describes the benefits to students in the understanding of both forms. Asserts that using visual arts improves students' motivation as well as their overall understanding of modernism. (PRA)