Using examples from college and high school students, the author describes how asking students to respond to literature using a variety of graphic media can enhance their interpretive skills. Some students who don't like to write essays or who seemingly aren't good at writing essays enjoy making graphic response to literature and are good at it.…

This article explores how Indigenous Canadian children's literature might challenge adult and child readers to consider different meanings and worldviews of the environment as a land-based value system. As three teacher educators from elementary and university classrooms, we use reader-response theory to explore a collection of rich alternative…

This rejoinder provides responses to the conceptual concerns expressed in the nine critiques published in this issue of "Educational Researcher" of the 2008 National Early Literacy Panel report. It explains the necessity of adhering to clearly established study selection parameters in conducting trustworthy meta-analyses and the need to be…

The focus article "Road Maps for Learning: A Guide to the Navigation of Learning Progressions" by Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) is a veritable tour-de-force, covering a great deal of education ground while spanning the heights from models of the interplay among curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment to interpretations of student…

This article expands upon Jeffrey Wilhelm's and Brian Edmiston's (1998) concept of a doubling of viewpoints by encouraging middle level students to use dramatization to take on multiple perspectives, to pose interpretive questions, and to enhance critical inquiry from inside and outside of texts. The doubling moment is both the activation of…

It is contended that in Harvey Pegues's essay on objectivism and constructivism in the summer 2007 issue of "The Educational Forum", Pegues conducted an intellectual discourse in which legitimate or good-faith disagreement was not an option, and disparaged and imputed the negative motives with which he disagreed. This article responds by pointing…

In this paper I discuss how taking a particular literary theory--the implied reader--serves to offer a focus for the teacher's initial reading of a text and provides a formative assessment tool. Iser's Implied Reader theory is discussed, after which a picture book, "Where the Forest Meets the Sea" by Jeannie Baker, is analysed from this…

The purpose of this reply to Kvernbekk and Lewis's comments regarding the discussion on epistemological and ethical problems of listening to children's voices, is not to propose a coherent foundation free from any epistemological tensions. Rather, Tangen's intent is primarily to explore different perspectives in order to disclose some of their…

Reidun Tangen begins by reviewing interest in children's "voice" (encompassing the consumer driven, rights based, etc). The main body of her paper examines the philosophical underpinnings of child voice in the research context and, in particular, various interpretations of "the subject" (i.e., the knower) and what it is that is known (i.e., the…

As part of its proposal to the U.S. Department of Education, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) committed to developing Kindergarten through Grade 2 Model Content Frameworks for English language arts (ELA)/literacy (K-2 Model Content Frameworks) to serve as a bridge between the Common Core State Standards…

This article presents the author's response to Hall and Gunter who accuse the author of trying to mount "a stout defence" of New Labour's reforms of the teaching profession. Hall and Gunter go further and accuse the author of "triumphalism" in his use of the title "Tony Blair's big prize". Their second and more…

Current directions in transformational learning theory incorporate the concept of emotional intelligence. The purpose of this study was to understand emotional intelligence as it relates to transformational learning by identifying factors related to individuals' emotional responses to literature. Specifically, the study investigated the…

This article reports on two studies investigating reader stance, navigation, and response in expository hypertext. Subjects in the studies included 69 and 147 adult readers prompted to adopt either an efferent or aesthetic stance when reading a 36-node expository hypertext. Reading was followed by recall and essay writing tasks. Results of the…

While Merrifield is correct in his basic argument that so-called "market reforms" in el/sec schooling are far from being pure market, he is incorrect to suggest that purer market projects are needed together with simulations of pure market reforms. There are two fundamental problems in that thesis. First, it is not clear that school choice in…

In this commentary, I review Kellogg's comments on a recent editorial in the journal "Mind, Culture, and Activity" (Roth, 2008). Concerning Kellogg's code-switching model for learning language, I present and exemplify a dialectic problem of multi/cultural literacy: the first articulation that crosses the boundaries of cultures and languages…