Ernest Everett Just Middle School, located in Mitchellville, Maryland, has a student population that is almost homogenous. In fact, 98% of the students are Black. As a veteran principal, the author's greatest fear has been not being able to provide students with a broad spectrum of ethnic, cultural, and religious experiences--experiences that they…

Unfiltered--and some would say inaccurate--blogs are the Wild West of the Internet, where mostly young citizen journalists (more than half of all bloggers are under age 30) routinely ignore mainstream media niceties like fact checking, multiple sourcing, and balance. Conversational in tone, blogs represent a new and powerful form of special…

Mary Coombs Greenleaf sought to take her place among the many frontier teachers who preceded her in 1800s. However, her destination--Indian Territory--was distinctive from previous American frontiers in that it was the geographical solution to a long record of Indian eradication policy. Mary Greenleaf was fifty-six years old, having just lost her…

The integration of nature studies within language arts instruction offers multiple possibilities for guiding students toward close readings of literature, their changing selves, natural phenomena, and the world around them. The authors document their own rediscovery of nature study and what happened when environmental observations were…

Detailed descriptions of classroom process are needed in order to ground discussion of the principles animating the mathematics education reform movement. In response to this need, teachers who were already engaged in transforming their mathematics instruction were invited to write reflective narratives about their evolving instructional practice.…

The paper describes a professor's use of student "research journals" as a means to encourage students to follow proper research methodology in developing a term paper. Students were required to make a dated entry whenever research work was done including topic selection and narrowing, preliminary background reading, aids consulted, online…

"Stonehill Writes" is an example of an in-house Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) journal that records what is being written and how it is being written by administrators, faculty, students, and alumni. Published at Stonehill College, a small liberal arts college with a student body of 1600 and a faculty of 107 full-time teachers, the…

Improving human-nature relationships is often a stated aim of outdoor education, yet this aim is not always made explicit in practice. This paper reflects on a pedagogical intervention which aims to find ways to explicitly develop students' connections with natural places through a tertiary outdoor and environmental education program. It describes…

Offers ideas on journal keeping that will help with the analysis of media messages. Points out that journals can help teachers gauge both their own teaching and their students' grasp of the material. (MS)

The second semester of Freshman Composition at Troy State University focuses on writing about literature and writing a traditional research paper not necessarily based on literary research. One spring, the required reading was Shirley Ann Grau's novel, "The Keeper of the House." This novel, set in an unidentified Southern state, traces the history…

This paper reports on critical Action Research into the scientific literacy of secondary school students, as evidenced in student Reflective Dialogue Journals. Focussed on one secondary school classroom located in Brisbane, Australia, the research draws on literature concerned with writing and its use across the curriculum, particularly as this…

This anthology presents excerpts from the journals of 40 of today's most noted writers, along with their comments on the role of journal-keeping in creating their art. Besides being generally instructional to other writers and a lesson in how to create a personal journal, the anthology is a look at writers in the midst of creating. It includes…

This book offers an entire year of journaling ideas--some serious, some "silly," but all tied to the calendar year. In fact, the book's sections are the months of the year. Each idea in the book comes with a fact-filled introduction and aims to prove that writing does not have to be boring or dull. As a special feature, many entries in…

This report describes a program that enhanced vocabulary development and communication within the content area of mathematics. The targeted population was a rural K-12 school district located in the Midwest approximately an hour from three major metropolitan cities. Evidence for the existence of the problem included teachers' observation,…

The independent reading program described in this lesson plan gives students time to read what they want to read, share what they have read, and receive the support they need for further reading explorations and reflections. Students will: work in a community of readers and learners, including other class members, family members, their teacher,…