The rhetoric program at the University of Iowa is an integrated skills program based on four assumptions: (1) writing and speaking are modes of communication, (2) writing and speaking are equally important, (3) writing and speaking can be taught together, and (4) the administration, relevant faculty, and teachers must believe that writing and…

Developmental theories, especially the moral development theory of Lawrence Kohlberg, can enhance the teaching of adolescent literature. Expanding on J. Piaget's model of moral development, Kohlberg's model consists of three levels--preconventional, conventional, and postconventional--subdivided into six stages: (1) punishment and obedience, (2)…

Reading comprehension involves making connections between prior knowledge and the visual information on the page. To reduce uncertainty, the reader makes orthographic, syntactic, or semantic predictions. Thus, comprehension is relative, dependent on the answers to different readers' different kinds of questions. The reader does not record a…

Intended to help teachers who want to offer their students the best native American literature, this paper analyzes a selection of books written by and about native Americans, in particular the Navajo Indians. The criteria used to select materials for the paper include historical accuracy, cultural accuracy, idealism versus realism, and reader…

As a reference guide to selection of children's books, this book considers the appropriateness of such books for bibliotherapy as well as issues of a societal and developmental nature. Each of the book's chapters contains an introduction to an issue, a section relating particular books to the topic, suggestions for activities that teachers or…

Assembled in the course of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, which examined the nature of collective and individual response to fairytale literature, this bibliography cites materials pertinent to response assessment. Listed by author, the subjects of the approximately 150 titles include language and meaning, poetics, literary…

Discusses the theoretical and practical importance of the interaction between children and their environment. Discussions of moral dilemmas in children's literature provide a rich source of interaction that could help children clarify the basis for moral development of higher levels of moral reasoning. (Author/SDH)

With the first teaching of a revised history curriculum due in September 2008 the debate over content and order is well under way. Robert Guyver, involved in the design of the curriculum development experiment that evolved into the 1991 version of national curriculum history, witnessed the debates about all of the key stages in that crucial year.…

Any teacher can teach black literature if he is willing to give it the same respect he gives white writing. (JH)

As composition teachers, we need to learn to stop evaluating the student writer's values and assumptions, and rather evaluate what he does working from those assumptions. (JH)

The white critic's role is to demonstrate the intertwining of Western and African elements in black literature. (JH)

Suggests using books to encourage self disclosure (an individual expressing the affect experienced toward his or her own thoughts and emotions and toward interactions with other people and the environment) as one way to foster healthy personality growth. (TO)

This study investigated the relationship between a reader's level of moral development and his preferred mode of response to literature. It was prompted by a common concern of high school English teachers: the difficulty experienced by many adolescent readers in responding to the secondary literature curriculum through an interpretive mode. The…

This booklet, containing eight instructional modules on works by major British writers, can be used either within a lower-level literature course for non-English majors or in a survey course for English majors. The first four modules focus on works from the early English period through the Elizabethan Age: "Beowulf,""Sir Gawain and the Green…

The characteristics of an effective teacher are examined in Aristotelian terms, with the objective of developing a model for the training of university teachers which addresses Aristotelian causes. A survey of research studies designed to identify the characteristics of effective teachers indicates a logical approach toward training university…