This article discusses how literacy and literature goals merged in a media project designed to encourage high school students to build new connections with the poetic elements of Shakespeare's plays "Romeo and Juliet" and "Julius Caesar." Using the free software Animoto movie maker, students were challenged to look closely at…

When teachers engage student confidence in discerning visual metaphor and when they make students aware of their skills, they can teach them how to transfer the reading of the visual to the reading of text. This article details some activities for facilitating that transfer. Engaging and challenging visual activities can lead to an enhanced…

The author critiques covers of "Ebony" and "GQ" magazines in order to expose race and class narratives, and he encourages teachers to help students to become more aware of the ways in which other images "connote cultural information." Because of the prevalence of images in contemporary society, it is imperative that…

Analysis of Conrad Hilberry's poem Hamster Cage". (SP)

An analysis and review of Truffaut's Wild Child," calling it as compressed and visually discreet a film concerning the teacher/learner world as any ever made. (Author/JB)

Defends Bradbury as a major prose writer. Places Dandelion Wine's major theme, initiation, in American literary tradition. Explores the novel's structure, and notes the influence of Mark Twain and Melville, among others, on Bradbury. (JB)

Discusses Hemingway's use of animals and animal imagery, in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," as a standard against which to measure and evaluate his human actors." (Author/RD)

A discussion of how a poem tells us through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said." (Author/RD)

Rock music's lyrics have excited high school students' interest in poetry. Several poems written by the author's students show that writing poetry can be a means of developing students' awareness of language and of teaching them to express themselves in writing. (JB)

Author details why the psychological studies of Jean Piaget have specific relevance to the teaching of poetry, especially his thought matrix which consists of four transformational processes: identity, inversion, reciprocity and correlation. (Author)

Discusses Dylan Thomas' poetry as examples of an art form evolving from real, human experience to word pictures which communicate a message in the sense of a vision . . . YofI the meaning of existence." (Author/SW)

Invites a different look at metaphorical abstraction in hopes of raising realizations about language processes, writing processes, and the mental activities involved in both. (RL)

Alternative genres such as graphic novels, manga, and anime are employed to build on students' multiple literacies. It is observed that use of visual stories allowed students to discuss how the authors conveyed mood and tone through images.

Discusses one of the perennial challenges of teaching English literature--finding ways to relate it to modern problems and issues and thus make the study accessible to students. Includes an example that relates the themes of "Morte D'Arthur" and "Chariots of Fire" and focuses on the sea imagery in both pieces. (JD)