This curriculum project, a lesson plan for a thematic literary study of war and its effects, has five goals: (1) to have students read various selections of literature on the theme of war from both the Middle East and the West; (2) to teach students to analyze the differences and similarities between wars fought in the Middle East as compared to…

In his February Commentary for "Adults Learning" (Volume 16, Number 6), NIACE Director Alan Tuckett warned that without greater public investment, provision for many adults would be under threat. This article presents several responses from some important players, from across the learning and skills sector. These include: (1)…

Religious education in England and Germany is similar in many respects and different in others. In both countries the subject must embrace religious plurality, and in both there are questions about the role of the religious communities in their relation to religious education. In recent his book, "Religious Education in a Plural, Western…

A study analyzed the discourse in a variety of Hong Kong newspapers to assess how an individual takes on the role of reader in relation to the rather complex public discourse of a daily newspaper, particularly in a multicultural, politically charged context. Four categories of newspaper (Hong Kong English, Hong Kong Chinese, non-Hong Kong Chinese,…

To put the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, which is concerned with the dynamics of reader response to literature, into a theoretical framework, this paper first describes how modern aesthetics take an interdisciplinary approach and investigate--by cross cultural approaches and in human behavior terms--the phenomenon of art and…

A detailed plan for stages one and two of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project is presented in this paper and factors considered in the project's research design are discussed in depth. The first section describes the working hypotheses of the project--that there are primordial patterns in the response to literature that are common…

Prepared as part of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, this paper contains descriptions of the core group of readers (600 18-year-old students) and the special groups of readers (each composed of approximately 50 subjects) who participated in the investigation of the collective versus the individual nature of the reader response…

As part of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, both an introspection and an essay study were conducted with Turkish university prep-school students and junior college students to determine their responses to three fairytales: "The Snake, the Fox, and the Man,""The Gold Apple," and "Per Smed's Whip."…

Chinua Achebe is one of Africa's best-known contemporary writers. His first novel, "Things Fall Apart," deals with the clash of cultures and the violent transitions in life and values brought about by the onset of British colonialism in Nigeria at the end of the 19th century. Published in 1958, just before Nigerian independence, the…

This novel is one of only a very few available that deals with Indian-American children--a rapidly growing population, especially in urban areas like New York, Los Angeles (California), San Francisco (California), Chicago (Illinois), and Toronto (Canada). The novel tells the story of an opinionated 11-year-old girl who lives in Ohio, likes to…

An undergraduate course in children's literature was developed at De Montfort University in Bedford, England, United Kingdom (UK). In a children's literature course for first year students from a variety of backgrounds, age groups, and future intents, it is important to consider the discourse of children's literature, to trace intertextual…

This preliminary report sets the Folktale project, an interdisciplinary cooperative effort involving literary criticism, linguistics, the craft of translation, psychology, and statistics, in the context of reading and reading research in the modern world, and discusses experimental reader response research in Denmark as well as in other countries.…

This report, the second of seven, part of an interdisciplinary project on the context of reading and reading research that explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature in readers from different cultures, describes the way in which potentially useful texts, i.e. folktales, were selected by team members. The report first…

The curriculum projects in this collection represent the culmination of a Fulbright-Hays summer seminar for educators which took place in China in 2001. The collection contains 16 curriculum projects: "Notes on Giving a Presentation to a Parents Group, School Board or Other Public Audience Regarding Modern China" (David Bilka);…

This guide to the best books for children published in Australia in 2001 represents the choice of the judges of the Children's Book Council of Australia. The guide presents a shortlist of books in all award categories except that of Older Readers. It provides discussion points for exploring each book, enabling teachers and learners to focus on…