Over the past decade, local live productions of Shakespeare have become increasingly visible to scholars and audiences alike, both through critical work on the subject as well as through public projects such as Shakespeare on the Road. This visibility highlights the cultural and artistic work of regional theatre. On the one hand, local live…

In an ideal world, classrooms are not designed for and educators are not trained to teach the average student because the average student does not exist. Each student has unique measures, unique strengths, and weaknesses. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) allows teachers to easily accommodate every student; it blurs the lines of special…

This article describes the driving question board (DQB), a visual organizer that supports inquiry-based instruction through the use of guiding questions. The DQB is a teaching aid designed to increase student engagement alongside science kits. Information is provided on its application to a lesson on buoyancy, highlighting how it improved…

This paper describes the visuals second grade students included in their own information book compositions during a science unit on weather during which multimodal science trade books on the topic of weather were read aloud. First, the multimodal nature of the information books used in the unit are described. Second, the teacher's talk about…

The texts that adolescents encounter today are often multimodal, meaning they incorporate a variety of modes, including visual images, hypertext, and graphic design elements along with written text. Expanding the perspectives readers use to make sense of the multimodal texts is an important aspect of comprehension instruction. Moving beyond the…

Ensuring science for all in the classroom requires that all students are afforded ways to grasp key science and engineering practices; however, we know that the practice of "obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information" can be a challenging task for children with high incidence disabilities (NGSS Lead States 2013, p. 15).…

Good learning experiences ask students to investigate and make sense of the world. While there are many ways to do this, K-12 curriculum has traditionally skewed toward reading and writing to interpret and express students' sense-making. But there is another way. Infographics represent data and ideas visually, in pictures, engaging more parts of…

This article presents an overview of the use of impact therapy, a multisensory, creative approach to counseling, in a consultation project the authors conducted with the managers of a local car dealership. The purpose of the consultation was to help the managers with the stress and anxiety associated with working in the car sales industry.…

Sensory overload and split attention result in reduced learning when instructors read slides with bullet points and complex graphs during a lecture. Conversely, slides containing relevant visual elements, when accompanied by instructor narration, use both the visual and verbal channels of a student's working memory, thus improving the chances of…

The increasingly integrative use of images with language in many different types of texts in electronic and paper media has created an urgent need to go beyond logocentric accounts of literacy and literacy pedagogy. Correspondingly there is a need to augment the genre, grammar and discourse descriptions of verbal text as resources for literacy…

Viewers who study photographs of scenes tend to remember having seen beyond the boundaries of the view ["boundary extension"; J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 15 (1989) 179]. Is this a fundamental aspect of scene representation? Forty undergraduates explored bounded regions of six common (3D) scenes, visually or haptically (while blindfolded)…

System theory, which attests that any change in one component of a system will change other components, is fundamental to the communication discipline. Students are often provided with verbal metaphors (e.g., the machine metaphor) when learning about this theory but many times are not shown its complexity in an engaging manner. Additionally,…

Although students may aim for an oral presentation that is clearly organized, well supported, and effectively delivered, teachers recognize that the primary goal of a presentation is communication; that is, the message received should be as close as possible to the message sent. Tools of message transmission, such as PowerPoint, are just a means…

Explores the usefulness of an alternative writing approach using a spatial-verbal technique called node-link mapping. In this process the student diagrams nodes, which contain key ideas and propositions, and links, which convey relations such as, leads to, part of, and example. Includes diagrams and examples. (MJP)

Describes a long-term project where middle school students were taught to visually represent key text ideas through idea-mapping techniques. Instruction was inserted in the content area curriculum along with regular textbooks and supplementary material. Positive effects were found in recall, comprehension, and learning. (MJP)