Analyzing the life and work of members of religious groups presents predicaments not always encountered in other biographical endeavors. Some problems faced by religious biographers can be illustrated by looking at works analyzing the writings and life of Ellen White (1827-1915), a Seventh-Day Adventist pioneer and educator. For more than a…

Kenneth Burke's essay, "Linguistic Approach to the Problem of Education," argues for tempering a positive attitude toward education--"drooping" should be the norm. "Drooping" would be the antithesis of an education designed primarily to facilitate students' uncritical movement into the workforce. Burke explores how a…

Transcribing and footnoting some 186 family letters and documents which revolve around social life at Antioch College (Ohio) in the 1870s and everyday life during the same period allowed a professor to examine a metaphor for personal relationships used at the time: colonialism. His great grandmother, a young widow with three minor children, moved…

Folklore and folk arts encompass the body of traditional knowledge learned and artifacts produced outside of formal institutions as a result of participation in folk groups. A great portion of daily life and culture is folk. Folklore and folk arts acquire distinctly local characteristics through the influences of geography, history, or talented…

A more literate society cannot be created in the United States or elsewhere without a more comprehensive conceptual framework. This framework attempts explicitly to link children's acquisition of literacy with that of adults and assumes there is no single normative theory to literacy development. In a life-span and life-space approach, literacy…

Using a literature-based thematic unit to teach language arts in concert with science, social studies, mathematics, and art, a Scottish teacher instilled in her 6- and 7-year-old pupils an understanding of their own lives, a love for language, and a feeling of satisfaction and pride in their accomplishments. The teacher developed a topic based on…

Practices intended to promote equity, reproduce inequity. Theories based on belief in individualism concentrate attention on individual differences, removing social differentiations. Being concerned with the formation of common culture, art educators present aesthetic objects as culturally neutral, devoid of the context from which they were…

This classic, definitive study of Black images in American movies has been completely revised and updated to include new chapters on the films of the 1970s and 1980s. This new version of the book reveals the way in which the image of Blacks in American movies has changed--and also the way in which it has remained the same. Following a preface to…

This collection of articles deals with research on writing, didactics, mother-tongue writing (sociocognitive perspectives, writing profiles, writing strategies), and foreign language writing (a survey of empirical studies, an outline of different teaching methods, and a consideration of writing as a thinking tool). Following an introduction by the…

The struggle in the composition community regarding the place of personal narrative in academic writing became particularly acute for a class of undergraduate Critical Writing students undertaking ethnographic work. By mid-semester, students had read and produced a series of texts about culture and found themselves reading and writing about…

Students' exposure to the Taoist thinking pattern should have a significant meaning in their cognitive development and life enrichment. The thinking pattern reflected in Taoist discourse is in sharp contrast to what is demonstrated in Aristotelian rhetoric. The circular thinking pattern usually resided in a paradoxical and/or relativistic…

Intended to highlight the work which exists on women's folk humor and to encourage its further exploration, this annotated bibliography has been selected to provide access to the key works dealing with the oral tradition in women's folk humor. The bibliography's 33 annotations range from 1968 through 1992 and are gathered under the headings of…

Different types of interviews serve different purposes; however, they all share a common goal of collecting data in different situations. The data may be factual in generating quantitative input for a research project, attitudinal in gauging public acceptance of a proposed educational policy, or used in gaining a better understanding of a certain…

This paper postulates that the television media in the United States is reflecting the country's culture-at-large. To be marketable, photojournalists adjust their nonverbal behavior to the cultural changes of the time. To prove the point, documentation culled from the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive is provided from the three major…

A study examined the narrative structures present in one young girl's writing and the way those themes were incorporated into a group's oral story creation. Stories were collected during a summer reading and writing group as part of a qualitative study exploring narrative structures being used by preadolescent girls. Subjects were 14 girls from…