Discusses how teachers and parents can help children turn everyday experiences into topics to write about, whether in the form of personal journals, autobiographical essays, or poetry. (MDM)

Suggests that the practice of ethnography in the spirit of Clifford Geertz's "thick description," and the thinking that this practice demands, can give college students both a tool for inquiry and a sense of their positions as authorities in the writing process. Defines thick description and discusses how ethnography works in a…

Surveys the popular and professional literature on incest to show that creative writing can be useful to adult survivors of incest both as a self-help technique and as an adjunct to therapy. (SR)

Responders to a journal may include peers, instructors, and oneself. Responders must balance direction and freedom in assisting the writer. Methods include descriptive personal response, holistic assessment, and partial assessment of passages selected by the writer. (SK)

Provides the framework that was used to incorporate journal writing into chemical engineering courses. Presents examples of student writing to illustrate the benefits of informal writing. (JRH)

Offers a peek inside the journals kept by a well-known language-arts educator, which he uses as a repository for his thoughts, drawings, articles of interest, notes from conversations with others on his own work, the work of others, and education in general. Shows how the journal is an "audit trail" of its owner's learning. (SR)

An elementary school foreign language teacher reflects on her first year and a half of being a Spanish foreign language in the elementary school (FLES) teacher. Highlights challenges, frustrations, and positive aspects of the job. (Author/VWL)

Takes a "snapshot" of a senior Literature class to see how all the participants--including the teacher--developed greater sophistication in their reading skills, while simultaneously cultivating their pleasure and appreciation of more challenging texts. Explores other aspects of the "interpretive community" of the classroom,…

Describes how to use students' journal writing as the basis for their own short stories. Includes developing story subjects by brainstorming and questioning, the basic elements of writing, the final product, and examples. (LRW)

Shares the results of a yearlong project of staff development where teachers kept a personal inquiry journal and participated in group activities. Finds the teachers grew together as a cohesive staff in learning to appreciate the inquiry process, to value the interests of their colleagues, to develop meaningful curriculum, and to enjoy the beauty…

Evaluated a teaching program designed to foster reflection on and development of more sophisticated epistemological beliefs among pre-service graduate teacher education students at Queensland University of Technology. Students reflected in journals on the content of an educational psychology unit in relation to their epistemological beliefs.…

Makes the case for the kitchen as a natural source of science exploration. Shares tried and tested activities and offers teaching suggestions such as the use of journals. Relates activities to the National Science Education Standards. (MM)

Science notebooks are fixtures in many science classrooms, but are students using them to their full potential? Ideally, science notebooks should be tools for students to grapple with scientific concepts and make sense of their understandings using recording and organizing strategies that are personally meaningful. Many times, however, students…

A current interest in education is the growing awareness that the development of social and emotional skills in children is critical for the foundation of academic knowledge in the classroom. The early childhood educator is in a position to be a powerful nurturer of the social emotional development in young children. It is important, therefore, to…

Students find difficulty in learning linear algebra because of the abstraction and formalism associated with concepts such as vector space, linear independence, rank and invertible matrices. Learning the necessary procedures becomes insufficient, and imitating worked examples does not guarantee the maturity level necessary for understanding these…