This book offers ideas that secondary teachers, university content faculty, and teacher educators can use to challenge traditional literacy practices and demonstrate creative, innovative ways of incorporating new literacies into the classroom, all within a strong theoretical framework. Teachers are trying to catch up to the new challenges of the…

This essay explores research and the representation of research as forms of advocacy. The "Mystory" format is particularly useful because it acknowledges the self as central to the interpretive process. Further, it implies a level of introspection and participation, both of which the author considers necessary in liberatory writing. Ultimately,…

Discusses the teaching of cultural literacy and the problems in deciding "what every American needs to know." Describes a teacher's personal feeling of cultural illiteracy when reading the poetry of a student. (PRA)

Describes a successful approach to teaching poetry--teaching poems in pairs or other small groupings, putting them in conversation with one another so that their ideas resonate and illuminate the experience of being in the poem. Demonstrates how poetry can be woven into the the classroom and into the lives of the students. (RS)

Phil Ochs was a prominent topical songwriter and singer in the 1960s. He was conventionally considered second only to Bob Dylan in terms of popularity, creativity and influence in the specific genre of contemporary folk music commonly known as "protest music." Whereas Dylan successfully reinvented himself many times in terms of his musical style…

Draws on Gerald Graff's work on conflicts over canonicity, pedagogy, and academic institutional structures to investigate ways of handling teacher-student tension over the use of popular songs in the classroom. Discusses two versions of a writing assignment dealing with such tension and what each assignment implies about the course's underlying…

For an instructor who has been teaching the Vietnam War for over 30 years, the War has been teaching him for even longer. One of the objectives in teaching the Vietnam War in the 1990s is what it meant to teach the Vietnam War in the 1960s. It is easy to forget that the antiwar movement began as an attempt to educate the government and the nation,…

A selection of romances from medieval literature can be used successfully in undergraduate literature classes to trace the appearance and relevance of medieval themes, motifs, and characters in works of modern poetry, fiction, and film. New scholarly editions, historiographies, translations, and modernizations give both teachers and students more…

Marking "Writer's Digest"'s upcoming 75th anniversary, this book presents a collection of the best writing instruction, advice, and inspiration written by famous and not-so-famous writers and published in the magazine from the 1920s to the 1990s. The 49 selections in the book are arranged chronologically and address: (1) selecting an…