A great deal of research on multiculturalism looks at different approaches to multicultural education and visions of multicultural teaching and learning. Though some research theorizes about how preservice teachers might learn about race or gender, there is very little work that helps teacher educators understand what learning about diversity more…

This study describes one kindergarten classroom in which informational books and other nonfiction resources were used in the context of a long-term scientific study. Children became proficient in locating information and interpreting content-specific textual features in the process of making sense of their scientific observations and sharing them…

Writing activities are an essential part of quality literacy practices in early care and education settings. As children communicate through writing, they learn important concepts about books and other forms of print in the world around them, including writing and alphabet systems. Young children best understand and appreciate writing when it is…

This collection of activities related to women chemists and physicists is designed for use in cooperative groups of three students each. Each of eight activities consists of a written account of the career and life of an historical woman scientist and four writing activity suggestions. The writings from each group can then be organized into one…

An instructor is interested in the ways that ethical inquiry can shed light on theoretical and practical concerns that are raised by composition's interest in postmodernism and cultural studies, specifically in whether difference can be negotiated while still allowing for rhetorical agency. Inquiry into ethics and composition can offer a new…

Students in 4 sections of a college reading and study strategies course at a comprehensive midwestern university (part of a special admission program for low achieving students) completed an open-ended assignment in which they wrote about their memories of learning to read. A free-form analysis sheet was developed to sort out the information in…

Writing must receive major emphasis in teaching-learning situations. There are important differences between creative endeavors and those that involve role learning and exact answers. Creativity emphasizes the novel, the unique, the original, and the open-ended. Creativity should stress writing across the curriculum, and should involve reading and…

Designed to help teachers develop a collaborative writing community in the intermediate grade classroom, this teacher's resource and support package gives teachers what they need to apply process writing principles to five of the most popular student writing forms or genres ("memorable moments,""interesting…

Serving as a way to sum up or apply many of the principles students have been studying in a general semantics course, a unit on advertising language is devoted to examining how advertisers select language for its affective and directive uses. The unit shows how language is used to stimulate consumer interest in a product and often to mask the lack…

The author maintains that middle level teachers can create curriculum connections that engage families in their children's learning and strengthen the home-school relationship. This article offers four examples of school-initiated partnerships, each of which connects students with their families. These are: (1) the Relative Letter, in which…

Are student-written reports posted on the Internet well written? Do business communications students think they are? This paper describes an assignment used during the first few weeks of a business communication course. The assignment gives business communication students a chance to evaluate a report from an Internet site that serves as a…

When teachers work to create empathy that transfers or translates the experience of the other into an experience an individual has had, they promote a kind of egotism that dismisses the other or that reduces the other to the category of the self. The key problem with empathy of this sort is that the focus is not on the other, but on the self. The…

"Online Writing Tutorial" (OWI) was designed and piloted in the summer of 2000 as a one to two credit writing course intended for Rensselaer Polytechnic students on co-op assignment in New York and across the country. Similar to its ancestor course, "Writing Workshop" (WW), which was a one-credit course designed to fit the…

Students sometimes respond to writing assignments automatically, almost as if they were a generic form, rather than by investigating the idiosyncrasies and unexpected possibilities of each assignment. Writing assignments can be structured to help students transcend such habits, shifting the focus from accumulating information to creating meaning…

Intended to take the fear out of what looks like a daunting task--writing a life story--this guide helps individuals record the events of their lives for family and friends and adds to a collective history. The guide outlines a method of autobiographical writing that can be used by a class but also by an individual writing alone at home. It…