As a teacher educator committed to raising issues of racial, economic, and gender equality and those related to an appreciation for diversity, the author finds poetry to be a powerful resource in social studies methods classes. When preparing preservice teachers for elementary and middle school levels, she finds that poetry can often capture their…

Performance theorist Herbert Blau's "The Audience" (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins Press, 1990) is an important yet neglected theoretical text on theatre audience. Deconstructive, dense and allusive in nature, Blau's text creates a real challenge for his reader. This paper presents a study of "The Audience" employing what I am calling…

The final chapter highlights five themes that thread through this volume: awareness of self, awareness of others, community building, social action, and art as a context for learning.

Assuming readers' emotional responses can inform literary analysis, this study of poetry readers featured an instructional intervention that involved modeling both cognitive and affective reading processes through a think-and-feel-aloud pedagogy. Eleventh-grade students in 2 conditions participated in a 4-week unit on reading poetry. Control group…

Haiku--the short, often nature-oriented poetry form--is generally intended to engage the reader in a single aesthetic moment. Every word, every syllable, counts, resulting in the reader being drawn quickly and intensely into the poet's unique experience. While legal analysis surely differs from haiku, in both its form and its substance, students…

The National Literacy Strategy with its accompanying daily Literacy Hour was introduced into all primary schools in England in 1999 and aims to enhance literacy standards. This paper is about the nature of interaction in the Literacy Hour. It is based on a collaborative micro-analysis of observational data from two poetry lessons conducted within…

Many anthropologists have turned to creative writing as they struggle to represent experiences/encounters with other cultures. Study abroad students, while not necessarily anthropologists-in-the-making, are also representers (and representees) of exotic cultures while abroad. This paper explores creative writing as a strategy to help study abroad…

This article describes a day in the life of Charley Hoce, a teacher and poet. Hoce starts each day with at least an hour and a half of writing and revising before leaving for his teaching job at the National Trail Elementary School in New Paris, Ohio where he teaches reading and writing to first, second, and third graders, as well as Title I…

In this article, the author relates her experience in teaching poetry and how it shapes everything she and her students do in the classroom. As a language arts teacher for students in grades 7 to 12, she discovered poetry to be magical in many ways, for it offers such advantages as, brevity, which allows a quick reading and discussion of a…

In this article, the author talks about her teaching approach which is from a transactional/ constructivist perspective, embracing both the work of Dewey and Vygotsky. She believes that learning is imbedded in social interaction as part of a sociocultural process that begins at birth. Learning does not occur in isolation, but within a network of…

In the early 1970s James Welch enters American literature as an Indian postmodernist, a fractured classicist of the West, drawing fragments from both sides of the Buckskin Curtain. Reading the likes of Cesar Vallejo and early modernists from Ezra Pound to Theodore Roethke and decreationists such as Ray Carver (through Richard Hugo's tutelage at…

Appealing to children of all learning abilities, this book provides fun and effective ways to strengthen reading fluency and comprehension; engaging and motivating activities that reinforce word-family concepts; 20 full-page, full-color transparencies of the poems; 17 pages of reproducibles; and independent, small group, whole group, and extension…

Dlott, an instructional specialist, was a neophyte at digital broadcasting and blogging, but she could clearly see that creating podcasts would help elementary students reach a large audience and fire their motivation to do research and write. Dlott details three projects involving podcasting that she and classroom teachers launched at elementary…

This study examines a collaborative reading of John Keats's poem, "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be," by two high school seniors with attentional difficulties in a mainstream British Literature class, with a focus on one of the students, Rita. The data consist of a retrospective verbal protocol during which the students recounted their…

With the current education climate so focused on accountability, teachers need to ensure that their teaching practices are supported by today's content-specific standards. To meet this need, "A Comprehensive Guide to Readers Theatre" shows not only how to implement Readers Theatre in the classroom but also how to use it to meet current literacy…