Writing activities are a sure way to assess and enhance students' science literacy. Sometimes the author's students use technical writing to communicate their lab experiences, just as practicing scientists do. Other times, they use creative writing to make connections to the topics they're learning. This article describes both types of writing…

Is it possible to teach people to write fiction? A more important and helpful question is: "how" do we teach creative writing? And "who" are the teachers? A published writer is not necessarily qualified to teach creative writing. To helpfully share their declarative knowledge with students, a writer must embrace the art and…

Explicit instruction on the skill of creating mental imagery from text supports reading comprehension and recall. This article shares a strategy for teaching students how to process what they read by comparing mental imagery to "brain movies." It emphasizes choosing appropriate fiction and nonfiction texts to encourage readers to build the skill…

There seems to be widespread agreement that to qualify as historical, the book's main plot must be set in the past. But how far in the past? Thirty years is sometimes listed as a standard. But does that mean set 30 years at the time the book is written or 30 years from the time it is read? The general consensus is that the book is what it is at…

Although biliteracy plays a vital role in academic achievement, there has been little research on the unique needs of female and male English language learners. Becoming biliterate is a complex process, compounded by other variables such as 1st-language background, class, culture, and gender. Among these variables, gender has been the least…

His father had been hacked to death in his own bed with an ax the previous November. His mother was similarly brutalized and left for dead with her husband but survived. On the last Monday of that August, after several months and many investigative twists, turns, and fumbles, there sat the son--the prime suspect--in Ellen Laird's literature class,…

Focusing on subject English, this article considers the role that "creative output" in the form of narrative fiction and poetry might play in the field of educational research. Drawing on philosophical insights from Biesta, and combining these with Nussbaum's articulation of the importance of literature to education, a case is made for…

Naturalism was first proposed and formulated by French novelist Emile Zola, and it was introduced to America by American novelist Frank Norris. It is a new and harsher realism. It is a theory in literature emphasizing scientific observation of life without idealism or avoidance of the ugly. American literature naturalists dismissed the validity of…

This article reads Roberto Arlt's short story "El jorobadito" as a direct and critical response to hygienic discourse in the first decades of the twentieth century in Argentina. Hygienic discourse served as a basis for an exclusionary social model that profoundly affected politics and the organization of the social body. It sought to…

Historically, US schools have failed multicultural and multilingual children of colour and marginalized expansive conceptualizations of home and community literacy practices. Given the importance of fully inclusive education, this article seeks to understand the ways in which young multilingual and multicultural children take up issues of…

Fictionalisation seems to render ethnographic inquiry suspect as research appropriate to the social sciences because it subverts a claim of realism or objectivity. This leads some ethnographers to propose alternative criteria for validation, such as participation and evocation, which offer alignment with realism; others suggest that scientific…

Given the current educational climate of high stakes testing, standardized curriculum, and "approved" reading lists, incorporating unauthorized, often controversial, popular literature into the classroom becomes a political choice. The authors examine why teachers choose to read "Harry Potter", how they use the books and incorporate new media, and…

Informational texts include books as well as text in other formats such as magazines, newspapers, and online articles. The primary purpose of informational text is to provide information about the natural and social world. Literacy research cites many reasons why nonfiction/informational texts should be included in primary classrooms. The…

In this paper, we expand on our presentation at ICDS2010 (Dobson et al., 2010) in describing the design of several new forms of interactive visualization intended for teaching the concept of plot in fiction. The most common visualization currently used for teaching plot is a static diagram known as Freytag's Pyramid, which was initially intended…

What is steampunk? Most call it Victorian science fiction. Steampunk can claim such authors as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne as its earliest writers. These two Victorian/Edwardian era writers created steampunk settings in books such as "The Time Machine" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth". In the 1990s, writers such as William Gibson, Bruce…