This article is concerned with teachers' engagement with educational research. It presents a subset of data from a larger study, which explored teachers' responses to educational research published in a peer-reviewed journal. In this article, I discuss four ways of reading that the participants employed while addressing the validity and usability…

Through this research project, I aim to address three problems in the instruction of basic skills students. First, despite the large number of students enrolled in community college basic skills programs, the success rate is low. Second, many basic skills courses are taught with drill and memorization, with little attention paid to intellectually…

In this article, a model of intertextuality is introduced as an instructional approach for postsecondary developmental reading courses. This model involves a scaffolded, schema building approach to teaching college reading that aims to link core material (a text, a concept, or specific academic content) with supplementary texts that focus on…

Contemplative education, including meditation, mindfulness, "lectio divina," and freewriting, regularly practiced in a classroom where a climate of "ahimsa" and nonjudgment are defining attitudes, can restore wholeness and foster engagement, imagination, and compassion in both instructors and students. This chapter proposes that a contemplative…

Because learning to meditate shares important qualities with learning to be a better reader and writer--for example, dispassionate noticing, becoming more aware of inner processes, a faith in inner wisdom, effort made with a light touch, the cultivation of a practice through simple, regular doing--practice in mindfulness meditation was used to…

Faculty members take pride in the great diversity of students attending LaGuardia Community College. Their students self-identify with various nationalities, races, religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Not only do students adopt diverse identity markers, but they also come to their classroom with variant skill levels. It is difficult…

There is something very democratic and creative about reader-response criticism. In a reader-response classroom, students progress from passive to active reading, from discovering a text to creating one. Also, students progress from passive to active reading, from discovering a text to creating one. However, a problem emerges when the spirit and…

Responding with strategic empathy to the traumatic stories students share with us provides an opportunity to break down an elitist binary between teacher and student. Joyce Carol Oates's novel "them" can serve as a cautionary tale for understanding the dangers of disregarding student trauma. (Contains 2 notes.)