This article emphasizes the importance of understanding local contexts to provide appropriate education for teachers about literacy instruction. The author reviews general problems that follow from extrapolating from unrepresentative research samples and the errors and deficit conceptions that follow from assuming that all cognition takes place…

The works of women African writers such as Bessie Head, Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, and Flora Nwapa have become increasingly familiar to North American college students during the past decade, largely through their inclusion on feminist reading lists. Because the pedagogical value of these texts lies in their presumed ability to speak for African…

The genre of fairytales, one structured form of storytelling, has been labeled "Marchen." German culture is orally transmitted in this generic form, and can be traced to a collection of 210 fairytales, the Grimm brothers'"Kinder-und Taus-Marchen," first published shortly after 1800. For this study, research questions were posed…

The persistent cultural conservatism in Western scholarship has led to the exclusion of Chinese rhetoric from the canon of rhetorical studies. However, the assumption that Chinese culture does not have a rhetorical tradition is misleading and inappropriate. It stems from any number of notions: that the Chinese language is not as logical as those…

In the Western Apache discourse community, landscape is not just the realm of nature in its sheer physicality. Neither are places in the landscape to be read as metaphors. Rather, places, visual things by reason of their identification with aspects of social hierarchy are literally giving moral messages, are imploring people to live right. This…

This first in a series of essays on electric writing focuses on communication efforts of the preceding oral, written, and print cultures. Topics discussed include face-to-face versus distant communication; political power; correlations between social structure and access to information; information accumulation; costs; authorship; and the content…

Dr. Terry Tafoya relates his experiences as a student and a therapist and integrates traditional Native American stories to illustrate the importance of balancing Western knowledge with traditional culture and values. Stresses the importance of approaching the acquisition of knowledge from different perspectives when developing graduate programs…

This paper explores some forms of inquiry that are becoming influential within teacher education. In particular, the document focuses on forms of inquiry variously called "stories,""narratives,""personal knowledge,""practical knowledge," or in one particular genre "personal practical knowledge."…