Designed to develop students' abilities to follow directions and organize and write their thoughts, this junior high level activity involves students in creating a dream person using magazine or catalog pictures and then writing a biography of this person. Materials include teacher notes, follow-up suggestions, evaluation procedure, and a…

While the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for logical and verbal activity, the right brain is the center of much of human feeling and emotion. Its vision is holistic rather than segmented or compartmentalized. Although schools today are geared almost exclusively to training the brain's left hemisphere, fantasy literature can provide…

Part of a larger rhetorical biography, this essay examines several of the narratives of the southern writer and humorist, Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944), to understand the unhappy "ordinary experience" of Southern racism and sexism. Following a biographical introduction, the first section discusses Cobb's narratives, while the second deals…

A stylistic approach to the teaching of English literature is required--one that focuses on the use of specific language styles instead of the traditional singular focus on theme. The only justification for studying English literature in its original language (i.e., English) is because the language used by the writer is a crucial element in the…

Students can be taught to interpret and write about literature by emphasizing the thinking skills or strategies involved. A series of activities emphasizes thinking skills since this is where textbook teaching methodologies sometimes get off track. The first activity is designed to find out where students are having difficulty in reading and…

Papers on art libraries presented at the 1986 International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) conference include: (1) "The Change of Illustrated Story Books in the Edo Period (1660-1880)" (Yaeko Kimura, Japan); (2) "History of Posters in Japan and the Present States of Their Documentation" (Itsuo Okubo, Japan); (3)…

Although more than half of all college students in this country are enrolled in two-year colleges and nearly half of all college faculty members teach in these institutions, two-year colleges are rarely mentioned in American fiction. An informal survey of over 100 people who read widely turned up only four novels and two short stories in which a…

More than one-half of all college students in the United States and nearly half of all college faculty attend or work at two-year colleges, yet references to them in American fiction are few and far between and usually derogatory. Examples used in an earlier paper on this topic are Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh," Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's…

The 1200 books, published from 1985 through 1987, were selected to provide pleasurable reading for high school students. Annotated entries, listed by author, provide the title, publisher, year of publication, length, type: fiction or nonfiction, and are arranged alphabetically under 47 main categories. These include: (1) adventure and survival;…

Although "The Equalizer" and "Finder of Lost Loves" are different kinds of prime time fiction--urban thriller on the one hand and fantasy melodrama on the other--they share an underlying dramatic structure and symbolic problematic in their repeated enactments of a therapeutic cure overseen by a mediating, authority figure. The…

Noting that books for children must be just as entertaining, if not more so, than television or film in order to maintain young readers' attention, this paper discusses combining entertainment with didacticism in children's and adolescent literature. The first part of the paper offers a writer's reflections on the experience of writing science…

The experiences of one child's storytelling events over a period of nine months were tape recorded in a study that examined which variables were the most important in the child's learning of narrative. The variables considered took into account the impact of different storytellers, different story genres, different interactions (kinds of parental…

The first grade study suggested that books that interest inner city children interest suburban children. (JH)

Humor can be a very effective tool to make students remember what they should know about the traditions and beliefs, manners and institutions of a culture. The teacher himself should outwardly be the embodiment of the culture which is taught. For example, when a teacher of French walks into the classroom the first day he should introduce himself…

The purpose of this monograph is to provide classroom teachers, librarians, and teacher educators in the field of children's literature with information that will enable them to make better informed selections of recent literature for and about Afro-Americans. The first chapter of the work places contemporary realistic fiction about Afro-Americans…