When college composition teachers carefully consider the role and function of multimodal composition in their classrooms, they can enhance the teaching of writing and communication, engage and empower students, and better prepare students for the challenges and possibilities of life in our rapidly changing digital age. To meet this teaching…

Two troublesome portraits of religious studies professors often exist in the minds of some students at any given time: the Guru, or wise spiritual teacher, and the Deceiver. These metaphors capture student perceptions of us that may be ill-informed and beyond our control. We will examine and compare how our own chosen metaphors for…

Despite considerable research on teaching and learning in higher education, the relationship between university teachers' and students' understandings of the same teaching-learning events has not been a focus. This exploratory qualitative study used individual interviews to investigate the role of conceptions of teaching, learning and knowledge in…

The media role model was recently developed to frame how science faculty members can teach their students to write more effectively to lay audiences (14). An Opinion Editorial (Op-Ed) was introduced as a novel assignment for final-year physiology and pharmacology undergraduates. This second phase of this study, reported here, demonstrated the…

Describes the author's experience working on a reader's theatre version of a radio play based on the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Reflects on how the grade 8 students created meaning for themselves and for their audience. Notes limitations of the script and format and her work within those limitations became the structure the group needed, a container…

Describes how a "virtual reality" production by the University of Kansas Theatre for Young People provided the opportunity to garner the perceptions and responses of child audiences as a descriptive study. Discusses students' perceptions of results. Provides little evidence of a "videocy" dimension of perceived reality, for it…

Suggests that educators need to accept that the young adult audience is unique and find a way to deal with it in order to create a literature from which teenagers can expect to gain a satisfying "sense of comradeship among equals." (SG)

Details a creative writing project based on "zines," which are independently created and published personal magazines. Notes challenges addressed in the project, such as composing an engaging introduction and choice of language in relation to audience. Concludes that the students were enthusiastic about the project, and were interested…

Explores possible responses to students' writings about religion. Suggests a social-epistemic response, urging students to examine their assumptions and to write for conflicting audiences. Proposes a unit on religious discourse, including various readings on religious rhetoric combined with students writing about their own religious background and…

Describes how a class of seventh graders learned to use diplomacy and effective interpersonal communication to let their teachers know how they feel. (PRA)

Focuses on the practice of having students "perform scholarship" in the classroom. Offers a model for student in-class performances of scholarly texts and their responses to those texts. Proposes that a student's performance serves less as a singular response to an assignment and more as evidence of the student's active process of sense making.…

Investigates elementary children's knowledge of the situational, procedural, and functional aspects of writing across grade levels. Finds that children come to understand the purpose of each step in the writing process as they are engaged in it; children need to write for different audiences and purposes; and children shift their focus from…

Considers how the book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"'s achievement of the status of a modern classic provides evidence that children's collective voices can sometimes cause the walls erected by the field's adult gatekeepers to come tumbling down. Discusses reasons for the popularity and controversy surrounding the book. (SC)

Interviewed students taking creative writing courses at three institutions of higher education in the United Kingdom. Analysis revealed a typology of four differing student conceptions of creative writing within two overall "transcribing" and "composing" categories; these categories closely resemble students' conceptions of…

Proposes that a crucial task facing a theater professor teaching an undergraduate dramaturgy class is to force the students to stop thinking like students. Notes that the tendency of students to assume that the professor knows more than they do poses a particular problem in teaching dramaturgy. Suggests that one of the central tools for teaching…