Describes a course on social inequality that utilizes service learning. Expounds that the writing intensive focus enables students to reflect on their service learning experience, integrate the experience with course work, and relate the experience to their lives. Finds that service learning fosters the students' sense of empathy and…

Most teachers and administrators have witnessed children using a derogatory reference to a group of people as a put down. Put downs usually reference non-mainstream groups who are different in ethnicity, gender, religion, ability, sexual orientation, class, or appearance. Hurtful name calling is but one example of how children express prejudiced…

Long an advocate of literature circles, Daniels recaps the history of literature circles and cautions against the "terminology drift" that labels practices as literature circles when, in fact, they are not. He offers resources that anchor best practice in this area, and discusses how the concept is evolving and expanding. He also introduces us to…

Two major issues are addressed in this teacher research paper: A description of strategies used by students in their dialogue journal writing and a description of strategies used by the teacher?researcher in responses to students' dialogue journal entries. The major findings are that students used L1 as a resource in their L2 for the following…

There is a strong relationship between orthographic-motor integration related to handwriting and students' ability to produce creative and well-structured written text. This relationship is thought to be due to the cognitive load which results when attention is required by writers to write letters and words on the page. Lack of automaticity in…

This collaborative paper explores the process of creating a learning community as a complex learning system in an early childhood graduate course. Reflected here are the course instructor's experiences and those of various students who took the course at different times. This exploration was inspired by the students' (re)created and repeated…

The study inquired into the effect of research-based video-cases on pre-service teachers conceptualizing their understanding of contemporary mathematics teaching. The 43 participants enrolled in a Mathematics Method Course viewed and discussed 5 video-cases of primary teachers teaching. Journal entries, lesson plans, and microteaching observations…

Conducting qualitative research on topics that are emotionally laden can have a powerful impact on the researcher. Recent literature addresses the essential nature of the emotional connection that must be part of the qualitative research process. However, for the most part, it neglects the issue of self-care strategies for the researcher that are…

A landscape painting metaphor was used to report the implications of this study of 33 graduate students preparing to become elementary and secondary school administrators who kept personal journals during their enrollment in an Issues of Diversity class at a private Midwestern university. The journals forced their cultural lens to be transparent,…

The authors describe a social approach to learning in community service learning that extends the contributions of three theoretical bodies of scholarship on learning: social constructionism, critical pedagogy, and community service learning. Building on the assumptions about learning described in each of these areas, engagement, identity, and…

The idea that "the personal is political" is both a commonplace in composition studies and something many have not yet fully theorized. The literature on personal writing tends to explore the relationship of the personal to academic discourse and the ethics and problems of intruding into students' lives. Because of this emphasis on the individual,…

As an elementary reading specialist, Lynn Mondello Caggiano, the author of this article, often worked with students who struggled with reading and other language tasks, including writing. After working with a group of students for whom written expression was particularly difficult, Caggiano came up with the plan of having the students draw their…

Two projects, the reaction notebook and the end-of-semester synthesis activity are described which could help students to adopt a discovery-based learning and engage students in practical applications of chemistry. Students have provided positive feedback on this classroom assignment and have felt that it has helped them crystallize their thought…

In this article, the author, a Web development librarian at North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries, recounts how she initiated the implementation of a series of open source communication and collaboration applications for the Libraries' Web site and intranet, and how she gathered a number of tried and tested C&C tools that can…

The role of technology has an increased emphasis in the PK-12 classroom and in the preparation of teachers. The wide support for the integration of technology in day-to-day instruction is evidenced at many levels and through many organizations. The current study focused on examining and describing the experiences of faculty and interns as they…