The author describes two students creating narrative versions of an event from Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" to portray conflicts in characters' interactions to address the issue of sex abuse. Through rewriting events in texts, students gain a sense of how use of dialogue can serve to portray larger underlying tensions between…

On a February morning, Ms. Nelson (all names pseudonyms) was preparing her eleventh-grade class for a new unit with the goal of crafting arguments about the people and issues present in the classic novel "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe. As, teacher educators Eileen Shanahan and Min-Young Kim were observing in the classroom, it was…

In this article, the author describes how she used a commonplace book assignment to help students expand their background knowledge and as a means to formulate mature, informed perspectives regarding issues of importance. In the assignment, the author wanted the students to: (1) investigate issues of the day; (2) develop multiple perspectives…

Sierra Leone is only one of the more than 50 armed conflicts currently going on around the world. It is estimated that 20 million children were either refugees or displaced internally, and some 300,000 children under the age of 18 were used in hostilities at any given time as government or rebel soldiers, with about one-third reportedly fighting…