Val Rust, Aminata Soumare, Octavio Pescador, and Megumi Shibuya's article, "Research Strategies in Comparative Education" is a very important piece of scholarship in the field of comparative and international education. Historically, there has been much scholarly debate regarding the theoretical approaches found in the field and, on a smaller…

Using a canonical literary text to elucidate a noncanonical one--and vice versa--is an effective means of teaching multicultural literature. For instance, John Keats'"Ode to Melancholy" and many of his other poems comment on Murasaki Shikibu's 10th-century Japanese novel "The Tale of Genji." Helping college students to…

The advent of postmodern criticism has brought about numerous changes in the way those in the academy read and teach the reading of texts. From Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?" to Roland Barthes'"The Death of the Author" and beyond, critics and theorists have sought to decrease the author-ity of the material that is read.…

Examining the role of service journalism in association magazines (magazines focusing on technical and educational information relating to specific practices of association members), a case study of the "Angus Journal" (a monthly magazine devoted to the beef breeding industry) investigated the problem of determining the amount of service…

A qualitative enquiry explored, with a range of family therapists and systemic practitioners, the influence they perceive to have been made on their personal and professional lives by the literary texts they have read. Noting that "literary" is broadly interpreted to include poetry, prose, drama/film, song lyrics, etc., the study's aims…

The "English garden" is a metaphor used to express the historical-geographical-personal knowledge of a language that is approaching 1,550 years of age. This article argues for third-dimensional learning that involves the internal, mysterious, and imaginative part of human life. (two references) (LB)

As an English teacher who has been teaching nearly 10 years in a college of southern Taiwan, the presenter reports his successful experience on a course, titled "Selected Readings from American Literature." In this try-out study, the presenter adapts a multigenre-response model via which he encourages Taiwan college students to bravely…

Much has been written about evaluating student writing in the composition classroom, but there is still a tendency, in the creative writing classroom, to enact unanswered assumptions about what makes a story or a poem "good." If experimental or postmodern fictional writing is not inherently apolitical, neither is it inherently political,…

A study analyzed the relationship between reading in various community structures and where people shop for goods and services, and whether this relationship differs by the type of community in which individuals reside. Telephone interviews were conducted with samples of 100 or more subjects in each of 10 Minnesota communities, including a small…

This paper discusses the creative process of one author, a professional author/illustrator of picture books. The paper muses about the meaning of creativity and originality and states inspiration has to do with careful research and looking for a challenge. Creativity is about testing one proposition against another and seeing how things combine…

For one Fulbright lecturer teaching Herman Melville's novel "Benito Cereno" at the University of Tunis (North Africa), the setting appeared to be ideal for a United States novel course. "Benito Cereno", for the most part, takes place on a large ship carrying slaves. Eventually, the slaves revolt against their Spanish masters…

Poetry provides language that is most likely to amaze, astonish, and delight reader and hearer. And children, before school spoils it for them, seem to have a natural affinity for poetry and verse. This paper discusses the ways in which children respond to poetry. The paper notes that relatively little research has been done to determine how…

The traditional treatment of literary texts in Slovene schools took place in the form of a search for the "true message" of the literary work. The new Slovene literary didactics assumes that the teacher no longer explains to the student the meaning of this or that literary work. Rather he/she knows that the literary work can be…

The idea of experience needs to be examined before the experiential aspect of literary reading can be understood, and before literary reading as an ethical practice can properly be defined. Open-mindedness is necessary when fostering student interpretations of a literary text, just as it is necessary for accepting the varying life experiences of…

A recurring theme within the prolific body of research on reader response is that of reader stance. Although several prominent theories of reader response spring from different perspectives, they share one common property: each describes reader response in terms of two opposed domains with particular responses falling somewhere on a continuum…