America was made by and for big ideas. Insofar as big ideas have shaped it, it is ever on the verge of hyperbole and dream. Today's big ideas come with an air of celebrity and accessibility; they glitter with glamour but demand little of the Americans. While they have many manifestations, people see them epitomized in TEDTalks. TED (which stands…

Over many years, the authors have inquired into the integration of science and literacy in primary grades. Students have used science notebooks as places to write and draw their scientific questions, predictions, observations, research notes, claims, reflections, and wonderings. At the same time, the authors have engaged their students in writers'…

The heart of effective programming for gifted students lies in the integration of advanced curricula with effective instructional strategies to develop leaning activities that will enhance student learning outcomes. However, empirical evidence of the effectiveness of units based on such curricular and instructional interventions from large-scale…

Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle, or Workshop on potential literature), an over 50-year old movement that began in France, seeks to apply mathematical constraints to literature and the arts. In this article, I will give a brief survey of this movement and how I have built a learning module based on it for my mathematics for the liberal…

This study examines the experiences of first generation college students at a rural university campus on the Southern Plains through narrative inquiry. Respondents who were recent graduates or who were about to graduate shared their stories through an interview and drawing process. Their interview responses indicate how they chose to attend this…

"Learning with Literature in the EFL Classroom" provides a comprehensive, in-depth and state-of-the-art introduction to literature learning in EFL contexts. Paying attention to both theoretical and practical concerns, the study focuses on a wide range of literary genres, different age and ability groups and new topics for literature…

The theory of memetic evolution--explaining the reproduction of cultural units called "memes"--illuminates the decline of poetry as a cultural presence by clarifying the contrasting attitudes towards poetry manifested by the co-discoverers of natural selection: Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. Darwin's eventual indifference to poetry…

Despite the well-known educational possibilities afforded by "Rhythm And Poetry" (RAP) for the development of musical, lyrical and critical skills [Morrell, E., & Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R. (2002). Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging Hip-hop Culture. "The English Journal," 91(6), 88-92. Retrieved…

This article is concerned with the epidemic of alienation created by colonization and the ideologies that maintain systems of domination. More specifically, it argues that a decolonizing holistic pedagogy can help address the root of our individual and collective alienation to facilitate healing. This position is supported by the findings of an…

We explore how the participatory, literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry can facilitate awareness of, and insight into polyvocality in educational research. Using found poetry and haiku poetry, we present a poetic performance in which we engage with diverse voices that manifest in multiple data sources: a student…

Rurality is rarely considered or oftentimes completely neglected in conversations about culturally relevant pedagogy. Yet, without a relevant curriculum, students both in and out of rural communities are left with dominant and deficiently positioned narratives about rural people. School librarians must provide counter and critical narratives for…

It is not clear that the literary genre called poetry has a future in the face of a reduction in literary study that Common Core's English language arts standards implicitly mandate-- and in the context of Common Core's drive for workforce development. Common Core claims the standards will prepare students equally for "college and…

In this article, the author describes a lesson on Asian cultures. Asian cultures demonstrate respect for nature through their art. Students learned how to use Asian brush techniques and designs to create scrolls. They also learned how to write Haiku, a three-line form of poetry that uses a pattern of syllables.

"Searching for Self" is a performance poetry piece that demonstrates the difficulties of identity construction in contemporary life. The author challenges the "self" and "other" dichotomy, and in so doing she attempts to reduce the distance between the "client" and "expert"; the researcher and researched; the service provider and service user; and…

English-Chinese (E-C) translation is part of tertiary curriculum and is generally text- or reading-based, and any course in relation to it is meant to develop the competence of reading, on a higher level, from a language comparative perspective. Chinese-English (C-E) translation is deemed by many as a productive skill, possible when the overall…