The lack of strong literacy skills and practices among students is perhaps the clearest indicator that the education system continues to leave millions of children behind. To advance the reading, writing, and speaking skills of middle and high school students, this study examines a professional development model that brought trained…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of rhythm and tonality on an academic memory task by comparing three different treatment conditions: a poem, a rhythmic chant (or rap), and a melodic rhythm (or song). A quasi-experimental experiment was designed and implemented, specifically a pretest-posttest-posttest control-group design.…

By exploring the categorical similarities between popular models of science, political economy, psychology, and sexuality, this dissertation addresses modern U.S. poetry's obsession with conjuring the unsayable. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the social and conceptual landscape that came to align the sayable with the cognitive and credible, while…

Twenty-first-century skeptics would say that there are really no such things as beauty and truth and certainly not goodness. A Pueblo poet seemed to think there was--"the corn people have a song / it is very good"--and unless people think they know better, they'd better listen up. This article begins with a short piece, set down by the…

Through arts-informed research (Cole & Knowles, 2007) I explore visual identity and scholarship. I conversed with and photographed Lisette, Edward, Kris, Todd, William and Theresa, asking "How are your clothing choices determined by your work as a scholar?" The photographs and transcripts inspired drawings, paintings and poetry. The…

The authors share the story of a performance-based poetry project undertaken by a class of grade 6 and 7 students. The use of new digital media for reading, writing, and representing poetry encouraged an exploration of the relationship between text and image and how images and sound might be used to mediate meaning making. New media have an…

Expressive arts group supervision is the use of music, stories, movement, poetry or prose, role-play or psychodrama, art, guided imagery, or play to help trainees develop reflective skills (Wilkins, 1995), express thoughts and feelings (Knill, Levine & Levine, 2005; Lahad, 2000), develop new perspectives (Gladding, 2005), increase communication…

This case study explores seventh grade students' experiences with writing and performing poetry. Teacher and student interviews along with class observations provide insight into how the teacher and students viewed spoken word poetry and identity. The researcher recommends practices for the teaching of critical literacy using spoken word and…

Raymond Carver's "Fear" is a list poem. It follows an easily replicable structure and provides young people an opportunity to express and share feelings that often get in the way of their learning. Each line but one begins with the words "Fear of... " In this article, the author describes how poetry can become the vehicle for students to…

Critical creativity is a paradigmatic synthesis linking critical social science with creative and ancient traditions. Our haiku summarises the essence of this three part paper. "Heavy feet of stone" describes the rationale for our creation of critical creativity. "Seeking transformation" sets out the background and methodology for our inductive,…

English as taught in city schools does not always reflect the Englishes city students travel with. Their urban English landscape is enriched by a procession of many voices that march in various directions in, around, and through the monuments of the city. These languages--Englishes, in this case--which have been traded on through various public…

Tales of love and hate, of athleticism, heroism, devotion to gods and goddesses that influenced myth and culture are a way of sharing ancient Greece's rich history. In this article, the author describes how her students created their own Greek-inspired clay vessels as artifacts of their study. (Contains 6 online resources.)

There is a need to integrate into classroom learning the out-of-school technologies that students interact with every day. We know that reader response approaches to the study of literature engage learners, and we also know that both students and teachers have mixed attitudes about the study of poetry. In this article, a response activity with…

African American students, commonly designated a sub-group in assessment data reports, consistently score well below their peers in mathematics. A consequence of this phenomenon is that math teachers often feel obligated to provide remedial methods of instruction focused on recall and repetitive practice, believing that these strategies will…

In this article, we examine the relationship between classroom talk, teacher-student roles and paradigms for literacy and learning in two ninth-grade English Language Arts classes. Our goal was to understand how these roles and practices socialized students into norms for academic language and literacy as they read and wrote poetry in preparation…