Usual student seminar classes involve students presenting papers to the class. Alternatives to this approach are offered that maximize student audience involvement. The suggestions incorporate variations of sub-grouping, idea generation, discussion of important statements, and the refining, clarification, and evaluation of key statements. (JMD)

Discusses how presenters must act as guides to their audiences. As an example, the paper describes a trip through the Serengeti in which the guide was powerful and effective in teaching his audience. Notes goals that all presenters must strive for (activities, engagement, content, dispositions, capacities, and ideals). (SM)

Discusses theories of aggression and questions commonly held assumptions regarding the link between violence and anger. Examines the link between strategies drama educators use and those utilized by counselors and psychologists. Considers whether the potential of drama-based programs might lie in the impact of shared engagement in the dramatic…

Contends that the value of writing as a powerful tool for teaching reading is often underestimated. Explains that when students write and revise their writing, they are reading to make sure what they have written is clearly understood by themselves and their audience. Notes that for many students, reading what someone else thinks stimulates their…

Notes that when students write and exchange poetry and letters, they feel drawn by the responsiveness to their words of "real" audiences. Argues that students sharing letters and poetry give voice to ranges of experience, to name features of their worlds that might otherwise have remained unnamed. (RS)

The present study explored the ways in which the production of digital media, specifically podcasts (i.e., downloadable digital audio files), rooted in the key tenets of critical literacy, can support education for democracy, in addition to the overall benefits and barriers of podcasting in an elementary classroom. The project can be considered a…

Teachers at both college and pre-college levels have long realized that collaborative writing is an effective learning tool for beginning writers. Many have pointed out that collaboration in writing groups properly shifts the focus from the teacher to the student, and allows writers to take more responsibility for their own composing processes.…

In their recent article, "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities," Devitt, Bawarshi, and Reiff maintain that genre analysis can enable outsiders to a discourse community "to connect what community members know and do with what they say and how they say it--their language practices" (542). Genre analysis,…

A course was designed around three major questions: (1) what is the relationship between rhetoric and its context; (2) how does the message construct a particular reality for the audience and the rhetor; and (3) what does the rhetorical artifact suggest about the rhetor? Feminist criticism is used as one of the three methods that focus on the…

Objects assembled in nonrepresentational fashion from tinker toy pieces are the starting point for a technical description writing assignment designed to increase the students' awareness of audience while at the same time giving them practice in description, analysis, and active judgment. Having been separated into two groups, each facing a…

English teachers must organize activities that will teach the true processes of revision. (JH)

Teaching students to write effectively for an audience involves students learning to talk freely in class until the teacher becomes one member of an audience, not an audience of one. The system works in a supportive, nonthreatening environment where the teacher admits his vulnerability and enters the learning-coping process as its guide. (JMF)

A program of continuing education is described in which lecture, skits, and audience participation are employed to teach practicing pharmacists how to improve their communication skills. Both live and videotape presentations were found to be effective teaching methods. Learning objectives and factors affecting communication are appended. (JMD)

In the summer of 2000, Education Development Center's Center for Children and Technology (CCT) was contracted to evaluate the LIVE @ THE EXPLORATORIUM: Origins project as part of the Exploratorium's three-year funding from the National Science Foundation. Evaluation planning and work began in August of 2000 and continued through December 2003.…