In this article, we examine John Updike's short story "A&P" and its depiction of the grocery store as a curricular space re/presenting consumption and resistance to it. We position Updike's fictional A&P as a space where the "big curriculum" (Schubert, 2006a) of consumption is enacted in everyday life and explore both how the curriculum of…

In this article, the authors introduce the "virtual dream", a technique that entails writing a brief, spontaneous dreamlike story on themes of loss, using a flexible set of assigned elements of setting and characterization to scaffold the writing. After providing several examples of virtual dreams written by workshop participants, the authors…

Too often, educators, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of adult education and human resource development rely on traditional curricular materials and an academic body of knowledge for teaching, evaluating, and training adults. This assumes a coherent body of prior knowledge, assumptions, worldviews, and experiences in their students…

While conducting a content analysis of award-winning, middle school fiction, I indentified a number of episodes and characters that might be used as models for students' writing. Research suggests that teachers can motivate students (Bruning & Horn, 2000; Codling, Gambrell, Kennedy, Palmer, & Graham, 1996) to respond to character-writers (Van…

English is best advanced by being relocated within the central aims of education, which in turn need to be drawn from Enlightenment values. Central among the latter is knowledge. The article argues that the least obviously "factual" side of English--novels and poetry--contributes to knowledge in direct and indirect ways. These include…

Using fiction in teaching sociology involves what Harvey Sacks calls "sociological reconstruction". Numerous comments on teaching sociology provide advice and suggestions on the use of literature and "what counts" as "sociological" literature, including specific titles. This paper goes further: while the use of literature is a routine feature of…

How is bibliotherapy with fiction hypothesized to work, and what are the ideal conditions for treatment success? Patterns in the bibliotherapy literature are explored. Questions are posed and suggestions offered regarding the practice of bibliotherapy with fiction.

Barbara Cruz describes how what began as a challenge (i.e., finding or justifying the time to spend on history instruction in an environment of high-stakes testing) turned into a rich learning experience for students using historical fiction. By designing experiences that were literacy centered but based in historical content, this group of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of adding historical fiction novels as a supplement to the textbook in an eighth grade social studies course. This qualitative study focused on student interest and feedback as their social studies class was altered through the addition of historical fiction novels. The research questions were…

If I can show my literature students how Nabokov can take them from familiar representations of experience to representations of less familiar experiences, from a knowledge of the given world to an understanding of the world of the imagination, then, it seems to me, I ought to be able find some way of showing my composition students how to do it…

Mass-marketed teen chick lit has become a publishing phenomenon and has begun to attract critical interest among children's literature scholars. Much of this critical work, however, has shied away from robust critical assessment of the postfeminist conditions informing the production and reception of young adult series like Private, Gossip Girl…

Explore claims of extraterrestrial life and our efforts to communicate with inhabitants of worlds outside our solar system. Even though there's no "proof positive" for extraterrestrial life-forms of any flavor, we've set the stage for applying a battery of critical-thinking skills to the valid analysis of scientific data. (Contains 3 figures and 5…

This article presents a list of ALSC and YALSA Book Picks 2010. The list includes (1) ALSC Notable Children's Books; (2) YALSA Booklists; (3) Best Books for Young Adults; (4) Great Graphic Novels for Teens; and (5) the Top 10 Quick Picks.

Rene Saldana, Jr., an assistant professor at Texas Tech University, is a writer of short stories, poetry, and novels. In order to get his storytelling right, he has relied on his memory when writing memoirs and consulted popular culture and family when writing fiction. In order to get his university teaching right, he reads seminal texts on…

This essay takes as its chief point of departure Jacques Ellul's contention that imaginative treatments of malevolent technology in antitechnological science fiction, by way of inviting rejection, refusal, dismissal, or condemnation, conspire in facilitating human acceptance of and adjustment to technology as it otherwise presently is. The author…