Debate regarding appropriate instructional practices for linguistically and culturally diverse students led to a study of a bilingual Latina teacher's third-grade writing workshop. Qualitative research methods were used to provide a rich description of context, instruction, and participation. This was combined with the teacher's personal narrative…

The paper analyzed children's perceptions of teasing within their real world peer relationships through participants' drawings and accompanying narratives. The case study research was approached from an ethic of listening to children to discover and uncover children's perceptions and experiences with the phenomenon of peer teasing. Fifteen…

The one year the author was an elementary librarian, she organized a Read Across America (RAA) celebration involving three different elementary campuses. This included bringing in community members to read, free books for students, and the piece de resistance--campus principals dressing up in the Cat in the Hat suit and reading to the entire…

In a music education graduate class addressing teaching and learning strategies for learners with special needs, teachers were invited to consider the experience of the children in their music classrooms. Using narrative to enter into the learner's experience of school, teachers confronted their own perspectives and reconsidered those of their…

In fourth grade, North Carolina students are required to write their own personal narratives. The teachers felt that telling a story would be a great stepping stone toward writing one. Rather than focusing on grammar and the mechanics of writing, students could focus on story development and creativity. In this article, the author describes how…

While environmental argumentation has recently received much attention from science educators, little consideration has been given to how personal identities and social relationships can either support or constrain student argumentation. This study attends to this issue by examining environmental argumentation as a sociocultural activity (how…

This paper describes how adolescent students responded to a poetry workshop in an English classroom where the content was derived from their knowledge from their various life experiences and understanding of world events. Informed by theories of New Literacy Studies, ethnographic methods of participant-observation were used to document an eighth…

The teaching of reading is a critical element of elementary education. Educators are divided about how to prepare reading teachers. This qualitative case study contributes to understanding the phenomena of reading teacher preparation. Descriptive research methodology and NVivo software was used to systematically examine the nature and content of…

In the present study, participants were 127 3rd-grade students, to 64 of whom (33 boys, 31 girls) the authors taught a general strategy and a genre-specific strategy for planning and writing stories; procedures for regulating the use of these strategies, the writing process, and their writing behaviors; and knowledge about the basic purpose and…

This article discusses a school-wide implementation of an arts-based initiative to address the alienation experienced by linguistic minority parents. In order to assuage the prevalent, although unintentional, practices of marginalization, a group of students and teachers established a platform that enabled shared discourse among minority and…

The authors evaluated the effectiveness of a professional development effort that was part of a 2-year Reading Excellence Act grant in a high-poverty, rural elementary school in the southeastern United States. The authors analyzed data sources, including observations, semistructured interviews, focus-group interviews, school climate inventories,…

This article describes a day in the life of a second grade girl in Beijing, China. There are more than 1.3 billion people in China today. This story does not represent the experience of all Chinese children any more than one of your student's journal entries would represent the experience of all American children. Still, the story, which describes…

Teaching upper elementary school students is a joy because they are still enthusiastic about learning and will contribute energy and invest themselves completely in worthwhile projects; will engage in higher-level challenges; work with a greater sense of future purpose; and can develop enduring habits of mind and habits of character. In this…

This dissertation describes an ethnographic case study of an elementary school in a border city in Southern Arizona. Its purpose is to explore teachers' professional lives at Cactus Elementary School (CES; pseudonym) through classroom observations, interviews and informal conversations. The majority of the fieldwork was conducted in the 2004-2005…

The partnership between Best Elementary School and Texas Tech University's College of Education has been in place over 15 years. During this time field based methods classes have been taught at Best, graduate and undergraduate students have been involved in tutoring programs, and activities such as field trips have been conducted in partnership…