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…

Teaching American Indian literature with online resources can help diverse urban Indian and multicultural students connect with American Indian cultures, histories, and Nations. This online-enriched pedagogy adopts Susan Lobo's sense of the city as an "urban hub," or activist community center, an urban area linked to reservations in which Native…

Evoking storytelling as a human tendency, suggests that stories involve sight, sound, rhythm, voice, and spontaneous imagination. Claims that because stories appeal to children's inner lives, they are optimal for communicating "life and human relationships and the totality of the natural world." Also claims that stories encourage…

This study argues for the integration of African oral traditions and other elements of traditional learning into the modern school curriculum. It thus contributes to supporting the increased relevance of education to local communities. In particular, using the example of riddles collected from one of the main ethnic groups in Northwestern…

Indigenous knowledge is a living, breathing concept and must be treated with care and respect. This living knowledge is transmitted orally. At the University of Queensland (Australia), the Torres Strait Islander Studies course was taught in the Indigenous way, and elders were involved throughout, from formatting the course outline to the running…

The work of experienced and student lower primary teachers in three schools in Southern Malawi was studied, using lesson observations, interviews and pupil tests. The use teachers make of songs is given as an example of how they use oral culture. The function of songs in lessons is mainly to manage the class rather than to teach content, in…

''Stories do not simply contain knowledge, they are themselves the knowledge'' (Jackson (In: K. Eagan, H. McEwan (Eds.), Narrative in Teaching, Learning and Research, Teacher College Press, New York, 1995, p. 5)). How can we teach well? Perhaps we can find answers through our stories from the classroom. It is through our stories that we make sense…

A college teacher altered her approach to evaluating students' progress in an American Indian literatures course by replacing written exams with oral exams. Students were given questions prior to the exam conference and were allowed one page of written notes. Suggests that written exams clash pedagogically with the literatures and cultures being…