Since young children in general can benefit by experiencing literature in which African-American children are the central figures, this book presents 86 selected children's story books featuring African-Americans as main characters and provides extension activities to involve children actively with the books. The books included were written or…

This bibliographic essay describes and discusses important books in a variety of thematic areas associated with the New Age Movement, which is a distinctive communicative phenomenon characterized by unconventional beliefs and activities. The essay argues that the single subject pervading the peculiar phenomena and puzzling thoughtful critics is…

Development and learning are synonymous in traditional African education and are embedded in the cultural and educational values of African people. The community, extended family, and a strong family life with children as top priority, play important roles in traditional education. Family education based on the people's culture and traditions,…

It is suggested that most students of English as a Second Language are more inclined toward video than print as a source of information and stimulation, and that to be successful, teaching methods must bridge this gap. An approach using comparison of different versions of one text, here Shakespeare's "Macbeth," is described. The 3-step…

Three different theory of mind tasks were conducted with 4- to 8-year-old Quechua peasant children in the Peruvian Andes. The study investigated the ways in which children in preliterate cultures think and the possibility that they think differently than children in literate cultures. The tasks included: (1) a false-belief task, which tested the…

This qualitative account of a magnet school, California's Ibsen School (grades 4-12), addresses teachers' professional identities and the shaping of them. In most high schools, teachers' professional identities are shaped by subject cultures. At Ibsen, a schoolwide community has developed because of its mission and in the leadership of its…

As suggested by current work being done in narrative inquiry, modern environmental educators participate in numerous stories by which they construct and reconstruct their personal and professional worlds. Modernist discourses have cultivated stories of the earth in which the earth is depicted as an object of instrumental value, a machine, rather…

Research on six major issues in reading is organized into charts and a bibliography. For each of the six areas (schema theory, reading strategies and processes, comprehension studies, culture and reading, methods for teaching reading, cognitive/metacognitive issues), relevant research is summarized in a chart. Each chart contains two sections, one…

The growth of intercultural interactions increases the need for nonverbal communication competency to help obviate potential cross cultural communication difficulties. Foreign language studies too often concentrate on vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, and forgo the role and methods of nonverbal communication. Japanese culture and modes of…

An exploratory study used stimulated recall to elicit a retrospective account from two alternative school students who choreographed a dance to depict their understanding of the relationship between the two central characters in a short story. Their account indicates that in composing their text they: (1) initiated their interpretation by…

The English curriculum needs to provide and structure learning experiences that enable students to speak, write, and read their culture into the curriculum and at the same time enable teachers to learn their way into the students' cultures. For students who do not or have not yet acquired nonverbal patterns of the mainstream, the communication and…

This paper describes an ethnographic study of school and community characteristics affecting the literacy development of Navajo children, and provides an overview of sociocultural factors in the literacy environment of one Navajo community. The researcher was a principal at Pinon Public School District #4 in Pinon, Arizona, in the heart of the…

This paper reconsiders the nature of literature as a school subject. Musing on three anomalies that occur when language arts teachers consider their professions about school literature and what occurs in literature classrooms: (1) the anomaly of the text and the textbook; (2) the anomaly of the idolatry of naive readers whose heads have been…

For completely unexpected reasons, a first-year teaching assistant's writing-across-the-curriculum composition course linked with the Indian Studies department at the University of North Dakota turned out to be a profound teaching/learning experience for him and his students. An important dynamic in the class was its unprecedented cultural…

From the very first, textbook editions of Shakespeare have been, "badly edited, ineptly glossed, and inexcusably bowdlerized" (Levin, 1976). What is studied in schools is a version, or rather a "perversion" of Shakespeare controlled by narrow religious, sexual, racial, and social interests. A fear of laughter and cultural…