Online booksellers have done a terrific job of developing ways to let customers share their opinions about books with the goal of getting a person to buy more books. They have also made effective use of the bottom line, which is what a customer spends those hard-earned dollars on, to further entice people to add one more item to their cart. In…

This article presents the author's response to critiques of his essay titled "Individuality, Equality, and Creative Democracy--the Task Before Us." In his essay, the author has started sculpting short polemical pieces that purposefully overstate his case as a way of disrupting dominant educational discourses rather than arguing against…

Persson (2012a) correctly raises the question of how cultural biases may impact giftedness research. He alludes to East-West differences in perceptions of creativity and ways that the collectivist-individualistic approaches may lead to differences in creativity perception. In this commentary, the authors discuss different approaches, and attempt…

This article combines interview data from a group of boys of color at an urban single-sex school and content analysis of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" to demonstrate the complexities of readers' responses to literature. Textual relevance, or the ability to construct personal…

Early childhood educators have a responsibility to foster healthy relationships as well as appreciation and acceptance for diversity through culturally relevant teaching in their classrooms. Culturally relevant teaching, a term that has been written about extensively (e.g., Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Nieto, 2010) involves intentionally…

Focusing on the creative writing of Year 6 boys as they make the transition to Year 7, this article establishes a theoretical model for creative writing as response. In line with Bakhtin's notion of utterances as 'interpersonal' (1986), the model demonstrates the complexity of creative writing -- the text is influencing of and influenced by an…

In a recent article in "Academic Questions" political scientists Robert Maranto and Matthew C. Woessner have suggested a program to reform their discipline and enhance its social utility. They encourage researchers to engage with consequential social issues and educate the public, while admonishing political scientists to resist partisan advocacy…

As writing instructors, the authors spend hours "talking back" to their students through written comments on their drafts. But how do student writers receive their comments, and what do they "do" with this feedback? Teachers invest so much time and energy in their responses to papers. How do they know what gets through, what makes sense to their…

Many researchers have attempted to uncover the precise contribution of fathers to childrearing in relation to both young and older children's development during the past five decades (Lamb, 1975), including during the infancy period (Parke & O'Leary. S, 1975). However, few have been able to isolate precise mechanisms by which specific types of…

In this commentary on Ziegler and Phillipson's article, "Towards a Systemic Theory of Gifted Education" (this issue), the author states her opinion that their alternate way of viewing gifted education is pedagogically sound. What Ziegler and Phillipson propose is creating a system where the interaction between action repertoires and the…

With this rejoinder, we address some of the concerns and questions raised by Ridley and Mollen (2012) and Hill (2012). Specially, we reflect upon Ridley and Mollen's commentary about whether the three theories in this major contribution can be deemed emergent or whether they are simply old thought in new packages. We also address Hill's question…

The purpose of this study was to investigate what teachers in a Western Canadian province were doing when engaging their students with literature. Forty two teachers from Kindergarten through to Grade 12 were interviewed, which allowed us to get a broad perspective on the types of reader response activities that are being taught in the classroom…

Our target article (Robinson-Cimpian, Lubienski, Ganley, & Copur-Gencturk, 2014) used nationally representative data to examine the development of gender gaps in math achievement. We found that when boys and girls demonstrate equivalent math test performance and are perceived by their teachers to be equally well behaved and engaged with the…

This paper responds to Michael Rosen's blog entries, "How Genre Theory Saved the World", arguing that genre theory in the tradition of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) has made an important contribution to language and literacy pedagogy. It emerged in the Australian context in about 1980 and was initially developed in response to…

This qualitative case study explores the nature of reading engagement, taking a reader response approach to analysing and discussing the experiences and perspectives of real readers. The paper reports a collaborative research project in which a group of five primary-age children and a group of five adults of different ages were asked to read and…