Offers guidelines for weeding as part of school library collection development. Highlights include developing a weeding policy; and the CREW (Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding) method, including reasons for weeding, scheduling, and guidelines for fiction and for nonfiction. (LRW)

Presents the "Structured Reading Lesson" as one simple way to structure reading activities so that the before, during, and after phases of the reading experience are all touched upon. Considers how reading strategies that students have developed to comprehend fictional narratives do not always help them with textbooks. Presents…

Considers how Francesca Lia Block's melding of the magic and the ordinary makes her work special. Suggests that magic is what makes people dream, and that the teen years is a great time to dream because there is still time to make dreams come true. Presents a nine-item annotated bibliography of titles for adolescents by Block. (SG)

Discussion of controversial fiction for older children and young adults focuses on two main issues: the relocation of controversial material, and why material is challenged. Includes a list of books that were challenged in schools and public libraries in the U.S. and Canada from 1984-1999. (LRW)

Hopes that teachers will expose students to many personal narratives, novels, poems, and other works from the vast body of Holocaust literature. Presents annotations of 21 recent Holocaust books for young people (published between 1994 and 2001) including fiction, nonfiction, personal narratives, and picture books. (SG)

Argues that precepts for cultivating the rational child, illustrated by Maria and Richard Edgeworth in their handbook "Practical Education," collide with fictional presentations of those precepts in Maria's novella "The Good French Governess." Considers how the collision between the demands of ideology and the needs of fiction…

Uses a fictional case to illustrate the complexity of politics in the literacy field. Describes how the fictional teacher educator is caught between her own ethics and the prevailing trends. Hopes that readers allow the mix of drama, fiction, and nonfiction to provoke reflection around matters of the educator's role in and support for literacy…

Australian higher education has undergone a process of policy renovation during the post-war period. Much has been written about the impact of this renovation, much of it written from a sociological point of view. There is also a body of more imaginative literature, campus fiction, which variously recounts, often in uproarious and light-hearted…

The fifth graders interpretations of one piece of Latino/a realistic fictions in a mid-western school, specifically around the theme of Mexican Americans living on the U.S/Mexico border is looked at. A demonstration is given on how drama-in-education strategies serve as a powerful set of tools to facilitate complex dialogues and interpretation of…

Young children reliably distinguish reality from fantasy; they know that their friends are real and that Batman is not. But it is an open question whether they appreciate, as adults do, that there are multiple fantasy worlds. We test this by asking children and adults about fictional characters' beliefs about other characters who exist either…

Science fiction deserves a greater respect, serious and critical reading and a better place in high school literature classes. Some of the science fiction books by Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury and Octavia L. Butler and various activities for incorporating science fiction into the English language arts instruction classroom are…

This article examines the process a diverse group of eighth grade students go through when charged with writing about the ways in which race might matter at their desegregated school. Students' articulations are bounded by a school culture of silence around race. The regulatory aspect of this school culture was enacted when students first make…

What are adolescents choosing to read? This is an important question because of potential divergence between school students' reading interests and reading expectations in school. This article considers the findings from a study of the reading over one week in May 2002 of 707 school students aged between 11 and 15, undertaken in 30 schools in the…

Higher and lower schools routinely take their cue from luminaries like NYU dean Catherine Stimpson, who famously opined that academic objectivity and intellectual rigor equal "mishmash." As a result, they feed students a diet of bland, uninspired readings. Carol Iannone is thus not surprised at the ensuing hand-wringing when the teaching…

Any girl who watches TV or listens to the radio is bombarded not only with negative stereotypes of females, but also with the message that the most important qualities to possess are physical and aesthetic. From where, then, are girls supposed to derive positive role models? The author began asking herself this question two years ago as an eighth…