Scholars in college learning and writing studies have argued that reading has an image problem: we have trouble "seeing" it. This study contributes to making reading visible by collecting a series of images used by faculty and students enrolled in first-year experience courses. Qualitative analysis of interviews with five faculty and 34…

In this article, Allison Upshaw presents an interdisciplinary arts-based inquiry, an inquiry she undertook as part of the work for her PhD, focused on the instruction she offered her preservice teacher (PST) students in the integration of dance/movement with literacy practices. In this class, the movement was based explorations on the reading of…

The ability to analyse aspects of visual culture--works of art, maps or plans, graphs, tables and X-rays--quickly and efficiently is critical in decision-making in a broad range of disciplines. Eye tracking is a technology that can record how long someone dwells on a particular detail in an image, where the eye moves from one part of the image to…

This article proposes a translingual/transdisciplinary rhetoric that aims to complement, rather than confront, current discipline-specific discursive, linguistic, and cultural conventions. Specifically, the article reviews various lines of inquiry on translingualism in composition scholarship and identifies and accounts for the challenges and…

This article offers suggestions on teaching a nonfiction unit (in English) and a genetics unit (in biology) that, together, incorporate reading, researching, writing, and advocating for an environmental issue. The multimodal approach described in this article seeks to integrate web-based learning experiences and digital texts along with…

This paper considers how children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing. It reports on the findings of an 18-month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, which aimed to consider children's place-related identities through their engagement with, and creation of,…

The implications of the transdisciplinary spatial turn are attracting growing interest in a broad range of areas related to education. This paper draws on a methodology for interdisciplinary thinking in order to articulate a new theoretical configuration of place-related identity, and its implications for a research agenda. The new configuration…

As students make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn, they find themselves increasingly isolated (Fang 2008; Guthrie and Davis 2003). Gone are the picture books and read alouds of their elementary years; instead, they are faced with dense nonfiction texts and the direction to read and learn the facts. In addition, many science…

The paper discusses the children's novel "Gaffer Samson's Luck (1984)," by Jill Paton Walsh, from three different perspectives; those of a cultural geographer, a literary scholar and an English teacher. It is part of a larger research project on children's perception of their place-related identities through reading and writing. The novel is used…

This article presents pupils' awareness of writing as elicited through a metawriting task, in other words a task in which pupils from the third, fourth and sixth forms (grades) were required to write about writing. The analysis of the texts revealed the pupils' increasing ability to write texts focusing on writing and on the subject's relationship…

The author outlines ways in which conceptions of texts and literacy may be distinctive across academic disciplines. Framed in theories of social semiotics, she asserts that each discipline is recreated through a series of texts, defined broadly to include any instances of communication. Texts in each content area not only instantiate a particular…

In a world literature course, an instructor faces the challenge of engaging the students in classical texts that are historically, geographically, and linguistically "alien" to them. Through a three-step instructional model that includes approximation, thematic relevance, and application, the instructor tries to help students identify,…

This article presents an interview with Gary Olson on the changing contexts of the humanities in this modern world. He emphasizes that the humanities are absolutely essential when it comes to the very real-world problems. He explains that what he is saying not just applies to terrorism and economic crisis; the humanities equip everyone to deal…

This article describes the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education (NUA), a nonprofit advocacy organization that engages with school communities through professional development to build relationships with educators, students, parents, and community stakeholders. NUA consultants are former and current university professors, former…

Presents a series of lessons for a U.S. history class on Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of America. Notes that this approach teaches students to evaluate critically the historical information presented in their textbooks. (MM)