The authors report outcomes of a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort through a study group developed to make connections across content areas (English and history/social studies) and grade levels (middle school, high school, and college).

This article provides a list of books for librarians. The list is grouped by type: pop fiction, literary, trillers, science fiction/fantasy/horror, romance, western, mystery, and Christian fiction.

Spatial mental representations can be derived from linguistic and non-linguistic sources of information. This study tested whether these representations could be formed from statistical linguistic frequencies of city names, and to what extent participants differed in their performance when they estimated spatial locations from language or maps. In…

Challenging the argument that liberal humanism faces extinction in the face of ubiquitous digital technologies, my dissertation analyzes the ways in which consumer electronics reinscribe the human subject as a privileged category in the information age. Through spaces like the Matrix, Windows 7, or even the single row of play controls on a…

Louisa May Alcott's juvenile fiction is often focused on aspects of children's lives that were also topics of reform in nineteenth century America. In "Jack and Jill" and "Eight Cousins," Alcott presents an idealized picture of child-centered learning, building on three central principals: (1) Good teachers are sympathetic and understanding of…

This article examines the representation of female education in Qur'anic schools in a selection of West African francophone novels. I argue that in being the earliest form of education for most Muslim women and also a neglected topic of scholarly interest, the Qur'anic school shapes their feminisms in more significant ways than has been…

As concerns mount over the costs and benefits of higher education, it may be worthwhile to glance at the benefits of high school education at present as well. Of course, high school costs, while high, are borne by the taxpayers in general, but it is reasonable to hope that there are sufficient benefits for such an outlay. One of the most…

In this article, the author recounts how he has become a writer and shares his experience in discovering who he is and what he does. The author didn't know who he was really until Ken Lincoln told him many moons ago in one of the seminal books of criticism of time. "Native American Renaissance" (1985) did much to pave the road that had been little…

In this guided inquiry, students investigate advantages and disadvantages of genetic engineering by integrating popular fiction into their study of bioethics. What are the effects of artificially created hybrid creatures on characters in "The Hunger Games" and in our society? What are the effects on and basic rights of the organisms…

The idea that different media can work in conjunction to transmit a story, understood as a distributed narrative, is a new one and has partly been developed as a result of the technological evolution of media. On a basic level, it has been applied in education in a similar way for a long time. However, transmedia storytelling based on digital…

This article proceeds from three main premises. First, we assert that popular culture functions pedagogically and helps cultural consumers learn about work, even before they enter educational programs or workplaces. Second, we argue that exploring portrayals of internship is useful in understanding the "attributes of formality and informality"…

We report a study that uses retrospective analysis to understand the relationships between American and Chinese participants' utterances during a conversation and the moment-by-moment feelings and reactions they subsequently described. Intercultural and intracultural pairs of Chinese and American participants talked about a fictional crime story…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

This article is a piece of "fiction written under oath." It reports two key findings of a doctoral research project, which investigated English teachers' reactions to the abolition of Year 9 SATs in England and in Wales. The research showed that in both countries, English teachers' pedagogical repertoires have widened as a result of the…

In this study, students and staff involved in an undergraduate science communication course investigated people's responses to a science-rich episode of the animated sitcom "The Simpsons". Using focus groups, we sought to find out if and how the episode influenced our 34 participants' perceptions of science, but our results problematised…