Pre-service teachers and education students in three different classes (N = 53) were directed to read a short story by Mark Twain titled "Heaven or Hell?" written within a compilation of short stories late in his career. The story, "Heaven or Hell?" illustrates a koan, or an unanswerable moral or ethical dilemma. The students,…

This paper explores how Scottish public library services have responded to providing a service to a virtually invisible minority group, i.e. lesbians who enjoy reading lesbian fiction. The evidence that provides the foundation for the results discussed in this paper was drawn from the following sources: a study of the 32 public library services in…

Maps have been used as an illustrative device in children's books for a long time; however, they are an area of illustration that has been largely ignored by critics. Maps are most commonly used as frontispiece illustrations in adventure and fantasy books. They have also generally been aimed at the male reader when children's books were marketed…

Arriving college students find themselves unprepared for the demands of academic writing. Despite the sometimes condescending critical attitudes of its literary worth and the pressures of composition specialists to use nonfiction texts as instructional aids, detective fiction, like any fiction, favors the underlying characteristics students…

For the student of American politics as well as for the student of Brazilian literature and culture, a close reading of a 70-year old Brazilian science fiction novel could provide some insights into the ongoing presidential campaign in the United States. In 1925, one of Brazil's most popular writers, Jose Bento Monteiro Lobato, wrote a novel…

A study focused on the image in children's fiction of the two largest minority groups in the United States: Americans and Hispanic Americans. It was descriptive in nature, employing quantitative and qualitative content analysis. Four research questions were developed to determine the treatment of two minority populations in contemporary children's…

Since the balanced literacy program presently mandated in California makes literature an integral part of the curriculum and leaves even less time for study of the sciences, this annotated bibliography provides some recommended literature together with the science concepts that evolve from those books. The bibliography also offers cooking recipes…

Over a 2-year period, several teacher book clubs were studied. Teachers' and preservice teachers' responses to a series of texts that focused on multiculturalism in American society were examined. Twelve elementary school teachers, representing four ethnic groups (European American, Asian American, African American, and Hispanic), volunteered to…

This historical novel for young readers tells of the experiences of Annie Rising Fawn Stuart or Agin'agili,, an 11-year-old, half-Cherokee girl who moves to New Echota, the Cherokee capitol in Georgia, around the time of the Indian Removal of 1838. It characterizes the inhuman treatment of the Cherokee people by the State of Georgia and the United…

This paper examines recent Australian children's literature. It focuses on the prevailing social attitudes in Australia towards gender, environment, and multiculturalism and how these social issues are treated in the fiction books written for Australian children. The paper also examines the implications for children's literature of the…

A multicultural literature course at Loyola Marymount University (California) was designed to complicate ideas of culture with gender issues and explored a common but largely unexplored phenomenon--writers who write outside their own personal backgrounds and identities. The course drew from research on "women's way of knowing" and…

This report is intended for use as a selection aid covering newly published materials from selected publishers. Reviews are prepared by school library media specialists in Oklahoma. Each entry provides the recommended grade and interest levels, as well as a rating. Also included for each book is a brief story synopsis. Reviews for fiction books…

This volume of a 1991 conference proceedings contains the conference's addresses and awards, a listing of the panels and workshops, and abstracts of those papers which were withdrawn from the proceedings to be published elsewhere. Among the papers in this document are: "Reading and Literacy: a Lifetime Work" (N. Bagnall); "The Image…

An English professor used science fiction to introduce his students to a range of questions about alternative sexualities. While a course proposal for a science fiction class being taught as a "diversity offering" with an emphasis on gender and sexual orientation was working its way through the bureaucracy at Pennsylvania State…

Theories of creative writing have been for the most part bound up with theories of art. Both teachers and the general public, however, are dissatisfied with such institutionalized theories. Creative writers should first look to theories of writing rather than infer them from art. Recent composition theories, both cognitive theories and those of…