Critical analysis of the literacy narrative assignment within the context of the other genres in a basic writing course complicates understandings of the political import of the assignment. While several advocates of the literacy narrative have argued that it has the power of what Jean-François Lyotard has called petits récits, the authors argue…

African American history and how it is taught in classroom spaces have been a point of contention with activists, historians, and educators for decades. In it current form, African American history narratives often are ambiguous and truncated, leaving students with a disjointed construction about U.S. history. Additionally, the pedagogical…

Within the African American community, African American males, arguably, experience a great deal of difficulty in the current educational system (Biggs, 1992; Kleinfeld, 1998a, 1998b; Kunjufu, 2005; Tatum, 2003; Wynn, 1992; Wynn, 2005). This study seeks to examine the role of culturally relevant texts and comprehension strategy instruction in the…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine student experiences reading nonfiction literature in a social studies classroom. It examined the transactions that took place between the readers and the nonfiction literature in a social studies setting at Fullerton High School, a suburban school in Northeast, Ohio. Reader responses, including…

This self-study explores the instruction of a novice teacher by an expert mentor teacher, while applying the strategy of asking questions instead of the more common pattern of giving advice and guidance in the form of telling. The study examines the educational potential embedded in the question-asking strategy as a key mentoring resource when…

In this study, we examined changes in levels of pre service teachers' reflective writing and tried to identify links between these changes and pre service teachers' success in teaching. Participants were two groups of pre-service special education teachers that taught in two different special education settings: learning difficulties classes and…

Drawn from a longitudinal ethnographic study, this article elaborates the trajectories linking one undergraduate's extracurricular journaling to her school writing and her emerging identity as a journalist. This portrait of literate development highlights how our sense of ourselves as literate persons is forged in the interplay of multiple…

This study was conducted to see what happens when preschool students were exposed to social skills lessons. The students that were selected attended preschool full day and year round. The students were given a pre survey on skills. The lessons consisted of six lessons that students seemed to struggle in. Books and activities were provided each…

Best instructional practice occurs when teachers work collaboratively. Many teachers in the target elementary school appeared to work in isolation, struggling to respond to the needs of low-performing students without the benefit of collaboration with colleagues. The purpose of this applied dissertation was to investigate the impact of a…

Diarios (journals) were implemented in a qualitative study. Students used diarios daily to process, practice, and review what they were learning. I found that using diarios improved communication between my students and me, helped me to better know my students, and pushed me to use good instructional strategies. While this study takes place in a…

Participants' performances of outdoor skills and leadership are interpreted for environmental learning using Ingold's (2000) notion of an "education of attention": the fine-tuning of their perception. The actual tasks and activities of adventure travel have until recently gone largely unquestioned; but the relationship between skills and…

In this study, the characteristics of teachers that motivate their implementation of reform curriculum, and the factors that influence the teachers' success in implementing the curriculum are investigated. In particular, teachers' internal struggles, frustrations, collegiality, and classroom successes during the implementation of the reform…

HIV/AIDS disease continues to be an escalating health problem, particularly among women. However, African American women are among the leading demographic groups for HIV prevalence in the United States. The typical woman with HIV/AIDS is young, in her late twenties, economically challenged, and of childbearing age. Participants were recruited from…

Collaboration allows for synergy in the classroom and increases the likelihood of meeting each student's individual needs. Co-teaching has been used as a method of collaboration for inclusion and multi-disciplinary classrooms in grades K-12. In this study two professors co taught an undergraduate reading methods course to model such practices for…

With today's emphasis on preparing students for standardized testing, it can be daunting for classroom teachers to find and justify time for the arts within the academic curriculum. Handmade books, however, offer a creative and academically enriching solution to this dilemma. In this article, the author describes how students made construction…