This article highlights the complexity of becoming a reader in public school classrooms, by describing the ways students' reading bodies constituted the sites and discursive means for the performance of diverse reader identities. Drawing on sociocultural literacy and post-structural performance theories to suggest the notion of embodied…

The Global Writes (GW) model is a well-designed performing arts integrated literacy program that builds local and global support among students, teachers, and arts partners through the use of innovative technologies. Through local partnerships between schools and arts organizations forged by GW, classroom teachers and local teaching artists build…

A case study illustrates how art therapy was used to elicit the narrative of an adolescent male student in transition from incarceration to a transfer school setting. Childhood trauma was addressed in individual sessions and within a literacy group co-led by a reading specialist. The art therapist responded to the client's needs by broadening the…

In Antonio Machado's collection "Soledades", the poet's search for identity guides an introspective quest where context, body, and mind form an intricate and inseparable connection. By extending cognitive capabilities to his natural environment, the poet, through embodied cognition and Theory of Mind, reads other people's and nature's minds to…

Consistent with a sociocritical frame and the analytic tools of hybridity theory, this article explicates how urban fifth-grade children made language hybrids using rap and poetry to participate in classroom literacy. Ethnographic data from a yearlong study illustrate two key findings. First, standards-based and canon-driven writing models…

The use of graphic poetry in classrooms is encouraged as a way to engage students and motivate them to read and write poetry. This article discusses how graphic poetry can help students with their comprehension of poetry while tapping into popular culture. It is organized around three main sections--reading graphic poetry, writing graphic poetry,…

This anthology explores life writing as a mode of educational inquiry, one where students and teachers may get a "heart of wisdom" as they struggle with the tensions and complexities of learning and teaching in challenging contemporary circumstances. Contributors write first-person creative non-fiction in a variety of life-writing…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of using music on teaching English Poetry in Jordanian universities on students' performance. The researchers followed the equivalent pre/post T test two group designs. To achieve the aim of the study, a pre/post-test was constructed to measure students' performance in English poetry. The…

When asked by a principal to design a workshop for ELA and ESL teachers on addressing new ESL regulations, the author suggested that they offer professional development that might inspire teachers to try new practices that could help their students grow as writers. The author decided to devote a workshop not to rules and regulations, but to…

Bereavement has been extensively studied over the years, yet scholarly work depicting, with the first-person perspective, the experience of childhood bereavement is severely lacking. The research question I set out to answer here is: What is it like as an Asian child to experience bereavement following grandparental death? As such,…

Functional literacy is important in both English/language arts and geography. Using the "found poetry" strategy, students will summarize a piece of text, identify main ideas and find geographic connections. While using young adult literature is a great way to incorporate geography into English/language arts classroom, understanding of geography…

This paper discusses a cultural exchange project that is being conducted between classrooms at the Songwon Elementary School in South Korea and the Lee School in Massachusetts, USA. As its main communication tool between the students in the two countries, this project uses VoiceThread--an audiovisual discussion tool that can serve as an ideal…

Writing and literacy development are crucial for the academic and social success of new language learners in the primary grades. Over the last 25 years, several terms have been used to describe the talents and needs of children learning new languages in early childhood settings. The term that the author prefers, and which he uses in this article,…

Breaking down the social, political, and cultural processes through which race, class, and gender worldviews are established, ideological literacies help students look closely at the intricate, contradictory meanings in texts. The purpose of developing ideological literacies in urban youth is so they become more socially conscious of the…

In this study, a researcher investigated how teachers can negotiate their practice to engage high-needs students whose life experiences are not reflected in the curriculum, without compromising administrative demands for standardized curriculum and pacing. A fourth-grade teacher in a high-achieving, high-poverty urban primary school in Detroit…