Using picture books in teacher education courses allows instructors to set theory in context, create a visual representation of it, and make theory come alive. The benefit of picture books does not stop at the college door, because when students graduate and have classrooms of their own they can use the stories and pictures to remember and apply…

Combined-text picture books unite multiple genres, providing nuanced information on a single topic from the unique lens of each genre. By providing guided practice in reading and writing a combined-text picture book, teachers can help students develop sensitivity to different types of texts, to what they do and how they do it. Such sensitivity can…

This study addresses the impact of functional adult literacy on the empowerment of women in the absence of formal schooling. It examines whether the effects of functional literacy are exclusively content specific or whether there are gains going beyond the obvious benefits and extending to other spheres of everyday functioning, such as…

As new information and communication technologies permeate classrooms and libraries, educators have the responsibility to assist students in comprehending and understanding the information that is now available online. How can we instruct students to become skilled, strategic readers when they encounter online texts and hypertextual formats? By…

An educator tells the story of her experience as a beginning teacher, and describes how and why she left the classroom after two years to follow different directions within the field. Her story of professional growth, personal reflection, and self-assessment suggests that, at least in her case, statistics about attrition rates for beginning…

In exploring her uneasiness in dealing with issues of religion in her classroom, the author asks, "Should I guide students away from writing about issues that explicitly dealt with their faith? Should I impose an outright prohibition on such writing? Or should I find ways to engage with the issues and the perspectives that were so clearly…

The authors examine classroom discussions of Hamlet in two distinct and separate contexts. They display contrasting patterns of discourse to highlight the influence of a classroom's interpretive norms on students' opportunities for critical readings of literature. The excerpts of classroom talk focus on how two teachers and their students…

This study examined how to propel the independent learning process of young adults through the development of learning awareness and personal commitment to improvements in reading. Preservice middle and secondary teachers enrolled in an undergraduate literacy course provided one-on-one tutoring for seventh-grade struggling readers from an urban…

This article reports a case study of a high school teacher's attempt to enhance students' development of empathy after guiding them to explore the cultural, political, and historical context of text. Empathy is defined as an other-oriented perspective that is congruent with another's sociocultural values, political ideology, and historical…

As a long-term advocate for, and practitioner of, both Paulo Freire's theory of "liberatory education" and bell hooks's "engaged pedagogy," the author subscribes to their principles of encouraging freedom of thought through active dialogue and the dialogic in an attempt to empower students by making the classroom a space that opens up to radical…

The author asserts her belief that teachers can turn movies into "a tool that allows students to understand content in new and intellectually challenging ways." She tells a personal story of using movies in her teacher education program, helping her students "learn and extend their understanding. However, they not only learned about content, but…

Many educators recommend reading aloud to students, but little is known about the nature of teacher read-aloud practices beyond elementary school. This article describes a survey of 141 middle school teachers in one U.S. school district. Eighty-six percent of the teachers reported reading aloud to their students; however, teachers defined reading…

People frequently make assumptions about others because of their spoken or written use of a particular dialect or language. The varieties of English that people use are often regarded as indicators of corresponding intelligence, competence, motives, and morality. Such assumptions--frequently based on myths and misconceptions about the nature of…

Middle school students are often asked to reflect on what they read by writing in journals or writing analytic essays. Another approach is to compile multigenre papers. Seventh-grade students each created a booklet containing 10 items in different genres, based on "A Single Shard" by Linda Sue Park. Students also wrote reflections explaining how…

In recent years, multicultural literature has made its way into language arts education reform documents, onto classrooms shelves, and ultimately into the hands of the diverse student body in the United States. This article documents the experiences of a ninth-grade class as students read and responded to N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy…