Relates stories of three middle and high school teachers to describe how teachers can effectively integrate young adult literature into the curriculum. Notes a variety of strategies, including the particularly effective use of multiple genre thematic units, where a variety of texts are linked by some common theme, allowing students to use…

Suggesting that instructors approach literature from a multidisciplinary life-based stance, this paper presents syllabi, pedagogical techniques, and a student essay which illustrates a life-based approach to literary themes. The first section of the paper deals with creative curricular re-packaging of great literature in which traditional course…

This paper describes a thematically organized interdisciplinary reading course, offers a rationale for including literature in a reading curriculum, and outlines an approach for presenting the short story in the context of a thematic interdisciplinary college reading course. It concludes with a brief discussion of two short stories and provides…

One of a series of Resource Papers for College Geography, this thematic study guide focuses on literary setting and the personal space of fictional characters as an approach to comparative literary study, and concurrently uses fictional treatments of landscape and place as a means to encourage greater sensitivity to geographical and architectural…

Discusses the need for teaching junior high and middle school students about the Holocaust of World War II and other incidents of oppression and persecution. (RL)

A "special themes in literature" course about illness and disability was designed to help future nurses to understand the human, rather than the clinical, dimensions of impairment and its effects on the sufferer as well as the sufferer's family, associates, and community. The objectives of the course were to look at such matters as…

An effective, 3-week unit on the 1920's in America, inspired by a reading of "The Great Gatsby," is designed around the idea of structure in history, government, literature, and writing. It has the following aims for students: (1) to understand the history of the 1920s, (2) to see literature as a creative shaping of the experience of the…

Recently, the use of thematic units in the teaching of language arts at the secondary level has significantly increased. This document discusses the theory and practice of using thematic units. The first section provides an overview of the use of thematic units and shows how such units can aid in teaching students about the composing process,…

A literature-based approach across the curriculum helps students to personalize content-area curricula, to enjoy reading a diversity of subject-matter materials, and to improve attitudes toward reading. Teachers, supervisors, and administrators can cooperatively support literature-based practice across the curriculum by creating a positive…

Written to address critical problems that arise in the study of American Indian literature, the essays in this volume feature critical studies that explain or make use of basic themes, motifs, structures, and symbols found in traditional and modern American Indian literature. In conjunction with the essays, the book provides a wide range of basic…

This training manual is intended to enable educators to utilize the SAGE Tri-Fold Model as a means for developing a process-oriented differentiated curriculum for elementary grade gifted students using either the separate classroom, the resource room, or the consultant teacher model. The program, a nationally validated National Diffusion Network…

Pointing out that understanding, considering, preparing, modeling, teaching, collaborating, assessing, and supporting are steps along the path to using literature in the classroom, the essays in this book provide a solid background for those teachers who are considering making the transition to literature-based instruction in their classrooms.…