This article provides a commentary within the special issue, Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension. According to most contemporary frameworks, a driving force in comprehension is the reader's ability to generate the links among the words and sentences (ideas) in the texts and between the ideas in the text and what the readers already know. As…

In this commentary, pedagogical reflection is examined through the lens of a practitioners' personal memories of childhood play. The telling of these stories uncovers and describes the ways in which teachers' personal "play histories" and their reflections upon them could inform their facilitative relationship to, provision for, and…

This article provides a commentary within the special issue, Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension. According to most contemporary frameworks, a driving force in comprehension is the reader's ability to generate the links among the words and sentences (ideas) in the texts and between the ideas in the text and what the readers already know. As…

In this response essay, Peter Taubman considers the relationship between melancholia and Freud's notion of a death drive. Taubman explores how audit culture sustains melancholia and intensifies the death drive, ultimately deadening our psyches by erasing memory, disparaging feelings, shutting down thought, and ignoring history. Taubman concludes…

In this article, author Daisy Christodoulou, a former teacher in the United Kingdom, debunks the myth that teaching facts prevents understanding, and she explains why teaching content knowledge is part of the primary mission of education. Throughout this article, she tries to stress that she shares the aims of many of the people whose methods she…

Ziegler and Phillipson (Z&P) have provided a valuable discussion of the identification and development of giftedness under a systemic umbrella, including issues of differing theoretical approaches and efficacy. This commentary considers their discussion within a novel systemic framework that links also individuals and environment, but in terms of…

Intertextuality is a vital component of college reading and writing. In order to write a paper that requires the synthesizing of readings, students must recognize the intertextual connections among all their sources. Instruction that fosters intertextual awareness in basic writers can help them overcome their tendency to compartmentalize what they…

In Israel, changes in history teaching and the publication of new history textbooks in recent years triggered a stormy public controversy that went far beyond the content of the books themselves. The disputes over how history should be taught revealed the state of transition that had characterized Israeli society since the beginning of the 1990s.…

An important topic of current brain research is "cognitive overload." It is about the capacity of a person's working memory and the strategies employed when that capacity is taxed. The most common strategy for coping with cognitive overload is shutting down, like that point in a conversation with a non-English speaker when everything one…

School is sometimes framed as a place for preparing, a place for becoming college and career ready. At times this approach positions school as an important space "within" the world of college and careers, envisioned perhaps as Dewey imagined it, as a safe place to try things, a space where real work of participation in society could be done but in…

This essay examines the kind of culinary memoir that chronicles the growth and development of the memoirist through the lens of food memories, in narratives that either begin with childhood or that interpose frequent flashbacks to earliest formative experiences. The author examines some of the key elements of this subgenre of the memoir, this…

We welcome the chance to respond to the five main critiques in Monroe and Mineka's postscript to their comment. First, they claimed in their postscript that they never denied that the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (4th ed., text rev. [DSM-IV-TR]; American Psychiatric Association, 2000) posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)…

Using memories is a feasible way to work with older adults. Through an interactive reminiscence process, older people often come to terms with "unfinished business" and untapped strengths. The process is important for adult education practitioners who can enrich their understanding of lifeways and inner worlds of diverse populations in their…

Presents some of Earl Stevick's ideas on language teaching and learning in the form of an informal interview. (EKN)

Provides an account of how one English teacher fosters awareness of the metaphorical nature of language and the sensory experience of poetry. Shows how the poem "Mnemonic" by Li-Young Lee can be used to instruct students concerning how poetry speaks to the memories of the reader. (HB)