Help students to explore the intertextuality of literature and to think more deeply and compassionately about the world. This book shows high school teachers and college instructors how to foreground a work's cultural context, recognizing that every culture has its own narrative tradition of oral and written classics that inform its literature.…

This article describes a book review assignment that is an application of enlightenment practices to a modern learning environment. This paper encourages both student learning in the content of enlightenment ideas and the methods of critical, accessible writing. Students engage in metacognition by using the critical reasoning capacities of their…

Argumentation has long been promoted as a core scientific practice in which students should engage, yet science classrooms still often omit it. One remedy is to incorporate socioscientific issues (SSIs) in the curricula. SSIs are open-ended and complex, typically subject to multiple perspectives and solutions. These issues, influenced by science…

The purpose of this article is to provide teachers and students useful methods for utilizing the power of comic books as literacy sponsors in ELA classrooms. Given the continued boom in the popularity of comics in popular culture, this provides a relevant way to introduce students to visual and critical analysis. Engaging in meaningful analysis of…

The ability to understand a speaker's or author's worldview better, whether an openly espoused ideology or one veiled and deeply hidden, should help students hone their critical thinking skills. This article describes an activity which attempts to do just that by applying new data visualization methods to a rhetorical artifact and examining the…

For the past few decades, stylistics has emerged as a discipline that encompasses both literary criticism and linguistics. The integration of both disciplines opened many opportunities for English literature and language teachers to get creative in their teaching--by introducing the stylistic approach in their classrooms. However, in a typical…

Teachers are encouraged to critically evaluate their philosophy of teaching and to help students recognize and examine their implicit ideas about education as well. This critical evaluation entails examining assumptions about teaching and learning, investigating the implications that follow from those assumptions, and considering alternative ideas…

This article describes an undergraduate lab exercise that demonstrates the importance of students thinking critically about what they see through a microscope. The students are given growth data from tip-growing organisms that suggest the cells grow in a pulsatile manner. The students then critique this data in several exercises that incorporate…

Online conversations help teachers engage in constructive criticism and attend more carefully to aligning lesson plans with problem solving. This article describes a strategy for using an online discussion board to help teachers evaluate one another's lesson plans. The online peer-review activity suggests that fostering critical pedagogical…

Understanding the scientific method fosters the development of critical thinking and logical analysis of information. Additionally, proposing and testing a hypothesis is applicable not only to science, but also to ordinary facts of daily life. Knowing the way science is done and how its results are published is useful for all citizens and…

Proposes a study of "Citizen Kane" in high school using a somewhat simplified version of post-modern literary critical theory. Chooses this film because of its familiarity and accessibility and because the ambiguity and indeterminacy of its text allow room for exploration by students. (NKA)

For many university teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL), the study of literature is indispensable because it exposes students to meaningful contexts that are replete with descriptive language and interesting characters. Structuring lessons around the reading of literature introduces a profound range of vocabulary, dialogues, and prose.…

There is a longstanding recognition in the field of language education that teachers must continually reshape their knowledge of teaching and learning. This knowledge is developed initially in teacher education programs, then becomes part of teachers' education throughout their careers through reflective practice. Reflective practice occurs when…

To help students develop a broadly generative approach to reading and writing about literature, teachers of literature should employ not only systematic procedures, but also the eclectic and utilitarian spirit of rhetorical invention. A semiotic perspective offers the most solid theoretical foundation for establishing a genuinely heuristic…

An adult educator who teachers General Educational Development (GED) test preparation conducted an action research project to determine whether learning activities requiring students to learn about and discuss famous paintings would equip them with critical thinking skills that they could eventually use when completing the reading and writing…