The assessment framework presented here draws on theories of reflective practice and mediated activity to update or "multimodalize" the reflective texts students are sometimes asked to compose after completing an essay. The article underscores the importance of having students assume greater responsibility for cataloging and assessing the…

When evaluating the effectiveness of their program, members of the Brooklyn College SEEK Department, a higher education opportunity program, decided to make their pedagogy more student-centered. They created a method of reading instruction, which they named critical inquiry. Its goals are to build community through teaching students to annotate,…

Shares some of the classroom practices that have worked well in teaching "Naked." Presents a summary of introductory comments about the story and a description of the sketching activity. Offers interpretive commentary on a selection of representative student sketches that reflect significant features of the story. Provides general…

Describes how two teachers have translated scholarship in the fields of ritual and performance studies into classroom practices (for the college literature course) that engage students in ritual enactment of imaginative literature and in communal making of meaning. (SR)

Describes a way students can get to know their textbook, not feel threatened by it, and get to know its many study aids by approaching the text as they would a new class member and by generating and then answering a list of questions about the textbook. (SR)

Louise Rosenblatt differentiates between two reading transactions: efferent reading, or concentrating on the information in a text, and aesthetic reading, a holistic process by which the reader "lives through" a text-world event. Current research in the whole language approach to reading instruction attests to the growing stature of…

Describes a schema-awareness activity (used with sixth graders and college students) that provides teachers with a model of how students can use their past experiences and their ability to infer and predict when reading. Notes that the activity convinces students that they bring to the reading act much more than they encounter on the printed page.…

Presents an in-class literature exercise to help students understand that there may be more than one "right" reading, more than one right answer, more than one right way of understanding literature. (SR)

Discusses the complexities of defining "realism," examining how the term fueled many discussions in the author's college adolescent literature course. Looks at how writers and critics define the term. Shares alternatives to circuitous arguments about the relative realism of a text that helps students explore texts in effective ways that can lead…

Describes how a reader-response approach can help students construct a portfolio of readings that reflects their development as poetry readers. Describes using a reader-response journal, communal learning activities, and a portfolio to create a recursive process through which students develop a better understanding of how poetry works. Discusses…

Describes the discussion continuum, a class activity that helps readers to interact with the text by taking a position that they will have to support. Notes that it promotes lively class discussion. (SR)

Describes an in-class exercise in which students listen to a piece of music (without lyrics), and then write about their responses. Notes that students learn that responding to literature is as natural as responding to music, and that they all have valid and unique reactions and connections to literature. (SR)

Differences in readers' interpretations of a given text illustrate premises of the transactional or reader response theory of literature. The theory holds that: (1) meaning resides in the coming together of reader and text; (2) the reader affects the reading of the text and is affected by the text; and (3) there are potentially as many meanings to…

Describes an assignment in writing documentation that turns the classroom into a laboratory for usability testing, giving students a clear sense of the reader responding to their text. (SR)

Discusses three pedagogical frameworks in which students have used hypermedia authoring tools to generate a practice of critical literacy, including critical inquiry into social worlds, critical response to literature, and knowledge construction in the classroom through hypermedia. Discusses how, in hypermedia authoring for critical literacy,…