Describes a variety of writing activities and community service projects designed to develop middle school students' civic identity and pride in being citizens of the state of Kentucky. Includes teaching ideas and a project evaluation. (PRA)

Describes a contemporary adaptation of the "Footprint Puzzle," whigh was first developed in the 1960s for the Earth Science Curriculum Project. Students sequentially look at three frames of track drawings. For each frame, students first list observations and then make inferences about the observations. (PR)

Comments on the following research finding: teacher-librarians who understand the search process, work with classroom colleagues to integrate the process in instruction, and intervene early in student support, more effectively guarantee student success and academic achievement than those who don't. (PEN)

Describes six activities from the "History Alive" program. These include an interactive slide lecture on the Great Depression, a photographic analysis regarding Mexican and Southwest culture, an experiential exercise concerning life on the assembly line, collages on Chinese belief systems, a response group on women's rights, and poetry writing.…

Describes a team-taught college course designed to develop philosophical literacy among students as groundwork for future humanities courses. Unifying motif was "dialog" between faculty from different areas of expertise; the concept of philosophy as dialog; and the student-teacher relationship as dialog. Discusses course design, lessons learned,…

Three courses in the adult education division of Loyola University (Louisiana) combined religious studies and literature appreciation using an interdisciplinary, team-taught approach. Instruction was guided by the metaphor of conversation, first through collegial discussion of the ideas underlying the courses and later, in the classroom, in the…

Describes a workshop used with classes doing Web research for their English papers in a computer lab. Shows how this is a good opportunity for students to learn to find, evaluate, and save Web sources, how to read critically and annotate the sources, and how to weave them into working drafts and avoid plagiarism. (SR)

Maintains that creative writing should be no less a part of the elementary social-studies writing program than other expository forms. Discusses using the poetic form, the cinquain, to teach about Mexican vaqueras and vaqueros in an elementary unit on the American Southwest. Includes illustrations and instructional materials. (MJP)

A goal of this double issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique is to collectively consider what we mean when we talk about knowledge about language. How have our understandings changed over time? What are the implications of these new understandings for pedagogy in the field of language teaching? These are necessary and important…

Undergraduate biology curricula are being modified to model and teach the activities of scientists better. The assignment described here, one that investigates protein structure and function, was designed for use in a sophomore-level cell physiology course at Earlham College. Students work in small groups to read and present in poster format on…

The relationship between attention to linguistic form and accuracy or to meaning and fluency in language learning has been explored by language learning researchers for many years. They point to the potential difficulties for learners in attending to form and meaning at the same time and the importance of exposure to meaningful target language…

For years, the author has been a fan of assigning students in business communication classes to draft messages that explained complex decisions or situations. The assignment is the author's variation of the negative or bad news message. This traditional genre has generated a new Web-based method by which people and organizations respond to public…

This study presents preliminary findings from research developing an instructional quality assessment (IQA) toolkit that could be used to monitor the influence of reform initiatives on students' learning environments and to guide professional development efforts within a school or district. This report focuses specifically on the portion of the…

This document is a library instruction manual for an introductory course on library research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The assignments provided are intended for independent study; a syllabus is included for the 7-week course. The manual is divided into seven sections. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the library system, services, and…

As part of a larger ethnographic project addressing the construction of gender through literacy, this study focused on understanding how the children in one writing process classroom expressed their social selves in their written compositions, as well as how those compositions were engineered within the social dynamics of the classroom. The study…