Discusses how four picture books, "Granpa,""The Tunnel,""The Wolf," and "Shortcut," provide the stimulus for children to become more effective readers through the use of sophisticated literary strategies. Explores some of the "gap-filling" required of readers as they deal with the indeterminacies…

Uses Orbis Pictus Award Committee criteria (accuracy, organization, design, and style) to examine an informational book, "Rice Is Life," by Rita Golden Gelman. Subjects the book to a deeper critical analysis. Suggests that it is important to help students become critical thinkers about everything they read, including informational books.…

This study is an investigation of what musicians consider to be their aesthetic experience with jazz music selections that vary in level of conceptual advancement (melodic complexity during improvised solos). Music major participants (N = 128) were assigned to either the jazz musician (n = 64) or nonjazz musician (n = 64) group. Data were gathered…

In the past, parents would wait outside of the room while storytime was in progress. The librarian would be the only adult in the room most times. Now grown-ups regularly attend storytime and seem to enjoy it as much as their little ones. And librarians realize that their adult audience is just as important as their young one. Recognizing the…

Not convinced that teachers and teacher-librarians were actively suppressing their students' visual literacy, the author decided to conduct informal interviews with four local teacher-librarians (three elementary and one secondary) attending classes at the university where he instructs. All four indicated that though their libraries were rich…

This paper suggests that some refinements might need to be considered to current codes of ethics for dissemination of research. The growth of research in music education over the last decade is reviewed, with examples from new journals, conferences and professional associations. It is argued that nowadays researchers have to address a…

One of the most watched political events in the United States at mid-century, the Army-McCarthy hearings coincided with the early period of the reception and evaluation of television as a force in society. Although optimistic rhetoric often attends the rise of new technologies, worries and fears about the power of television pervaded coverage of…

While we often assume media are highly effective tools for learning, research shows an unpredictable relationship between text and audience response, with variable interpretation being the norm. This can be especially problematic in anthropology, whose central goal is to understand different cultures; some studies suggest that films may reinforce…

Media literacy is a topic that is being addressed globally as greater numbers of people become aware of the need to teach audience members how they are influenced by the media. Here, two of its broad categories - captive and voluntary - are identified. Examples of media literacy programs in Canada and Australia are also presented to illustrate the…

High school students can actually write for real audiences and also meet state and national standards. A high school teacher confronts the challenge of helping the students to do so by requiring students to complete a senior project, authentic writing assignment.

In marketing one's library wares, an effective publicity strategy is to use promotional giveaway materials, mainly personalized items that promote one's resources and services. As with any marketing effort, it is important to be clear about the promotional initiative and whom librarians are attempting to reach. This author emphasizes that…

Scrapbooks present a particularly challenging set of preservation issues to archivists. However, as an intriguing combination of diaries, photograph albums, and ephemera, their format and arrangement are an essential part of their usefulness as sources to researchers. The fascinating link between scrapbooks and quilts, evident in a brief history…

An American, invited to speak on aesthetics and creativity, came away from the academic conference in the city of Perm fascinated by the character of the Russians he met, but depressed at the shabbiness and the creativity-dispelling gracelessness of the proceedings. Lecturers had apparently become accustomed to going through the motions in mumbled…

In this article, the author shares how she used a video on animals to teach her graduate classes about subjectivity in assessment. For this video assessment, she made her students evaluate the video based on five categories: content, structure, sensitivity to audience, audio, and visual. As a teacher, she knows how impossible it is to be totally…

The purpose of this study was to discuss the dance technique class experiences of students in a university dance program. Working within a post-positivist methodological framework, I interviewed five university dancers. Using the lenses of phenomenology and hermeneutics, I compared and contrasted the women's stories with each other's and my own.…