This article addresses approaches to differentiating instruction to meet the needs of students whose literacy needs, interests, and strengths vary widely. This article was designed to support classroom teachers who understand the importance of differentiating instruction, but are unsure of how best to design and implement differentiation within…

In this paper, the authors investigate the enduring power of voice as a concept in writing pedagogy. They argue that one can benefit from considering Elbow's assertion that both text and voice be considered as important aspects of written discourse. In particular, voice is a powerful metaphor for the material, social and historical nature of…

Preparing teachers to understand their students' reading processes so that they can guide their students toward connecting with texts in meaningful and personal ways are goals that can be met through the study of young adult literature. Twenty-first century learners live in an increasingly interconnected world and have access to countless texts…

The "elaborate systems of communication" that historian Christopher Lasch observed nearly three decades ago have intensified in complexity and scope. The explosion of the Internet and wireless technologies has resulted in a dizzying proliferation of texts. Teachers and students are but a keystroke or mouse click away from a limitless stream of…

My experience of people's life stories from my work as a narrative therapist consistently destabilised distinctions between imagined/magical and real experiences. I came to realise that the day-to-day magical realist juxtapositions I came upon were encounters with people's daily lives, as lived, that have remained unacknowledged within the…

Teaching learners how to comprehend text remains a largely unsuccessful attempt in our school system. Drawing from the fields of learning sciences, education, instructional design, and performance improvement, we designed, tested, revised, and released to schools and homes an interactive online program that reliably teaches flexible, widely…

Supporting the reading development of college students is the responsibility of all professors. As experts in the field, with experience navigating and interpreting readings in a particular discipline, professors are obligated to think of themselves as master artisans apprenticing their students to the craft of reading. Texts in all subject areas…

In this article, we explore the influence of mathematics graduate students' experiences with the teaching assistantships and texts that they encounter in their programs on their development and identity as teachers. We look to von Foerster's notion of trivial and non-trivial machines to interpret the graduate students' experiences and explain how…

This article presents 34 characteristics of texts and tasks ("text features") that can make continuous (prose), noncontinuous (document), and quantitative texts easier or more difficult for adolescents and adults to comprehend and use. The text features were identified by examining the assessment tasks and associated texts in the national…

This article provides an analysis of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's "The Medium Is the Massage," a visual-verbal text that is generally acknowledged as innovative but seldom taken seriously or read carefully. The analysis draws on the visual language vocabulary developed by Scott McCloud in "Understanding Comics" and argues that the field of…

This study explores the process of implementing literature circles using ethnographies as the texts to better prepare teachers for multicultural/ multilingual teaching contexts. Data collected by the course instructor and two of the participants, using a Critical Teacher Action Research (CTAR) methodology, indicate that participants think…

Transaction circles weave together elements of guided reading and literature circles in an open conversational structure that supports students as agentive learners. Discourse within these circles utilizing digital informational texts assist in the development of democratic practices even in a time when federal mandates limit curricula and…

Although interaction is recognised as a key element for learning, its incorporation in online courses can be challenging. The interaction equivalency theorem provides guidelines: Meaningful learning can be supported as long as one of three types of interactions (learner-content, learner-teacher and learner-learner) is present at a high level. This…

This case study investigates the metacognitive reading strategies of three advanced proficient trilingual readers whose native language is Hausa. The study examines the reading strategies employed by the three readers in English, French and Hausa. The aim of the study was to compare the reading strategy profiles of trilingual readers through…

The semiotic world that we inhabit (within and outside the academy) is fast changing in terms of the resources that are used and the practices in which many engage. Yet the institutional norms governing highly consequential academic texts--students' texts assessed as part of their disciplinary-based activity and scholars' papers submitted for…