In this essay, the author describes his curricular journey in creating a course on narrative inquiry and memoir for experienced early childhood educators. The author recounts the steps he took in selecting reading texts and activities for the course, and emphasizes the value of using poetry as a form of narrative for helping early childhood…

The employment interview is intended to provide insight into a candidate's future performance by evaluating the oral responses to the questions presented by the interviewer. For decades, researchers have studied many facets of the interview and have produced mixed results as to the predictive validity of the employment interview. Still,…

In an August 14, 2008 story, the New York Times reported that ethnic and racial minorities will likely be a majority of the U.S. population by 2042. Many of the blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and others constituting this emerging majority will be immigrants or the children of immigrants; the number of foreigners hitting these shores is projected to…

This article is about a book club for middle school boys. The idea of a book club for boys came from the author's concern about what he had been hearing and reading about boys falling behind in their reading abilities. The purpose of establishing the club was to discover from the boys themselves what could be done to support them in their reading.…

Student-centered tasks, such as having students select vocabulary to be learned, offer one way of supporting both content area learning and independent word learning. The underlying foundation of these tasks is the vocabulary terms and phrases that students personally deem important for understanding what is read. With this in mind, the authors…

This study examined the effectiveness of an intervention package that included visual accommodations, daily preference assessments, and naturalistic instructional strategies on the accuracy of choice-making responses for three participants with visual impairments and multiple disabilities. It also examined the participants' ability to maintain and…

Street lit is controversial stuff. Even though street lit is a huge hit with today's teens, one will not find the semiautobiographical novels of Vickie Stringer and Nikki Turner, the grandes dames of urban fiction, on many (if any) high school reading lists or, for that matter, on some public libraries' shelves. That's because street lit (aka…

Ethical questions have long been the impetus for philosophical inquiry around the world. When ethical questions arise in the classroom, during advising or in other academic settings, university and college instructors may appeal to the ethical codes within their own discipline for guidance. The materials presented in this article review…

Deciding whether to go with a particular open source product is an exercise in risk management: understanding the risks of one's possible actions and choices, calculating when a certain level of risk is appropriate to reach a desired outcome, and planning for how to handle negative outcomes. To be sure, opting to go with a particular proprietary…

Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not…

Choosing a college major represents a major life decision--a decision that research has shown to be the most frequently identified life regret for Americans. The focus of this study is to identify the foundations of the psychological process by which undergraduate students select their academic majors. A means-end analysis was first employed to…

President-elect Barack Obama and his team started work this week on a transition that includes searching for the people who will bring to life his agenda of expanding preschool, improving the quality of teachers, and fixing the major federal law in K-12 education. Within 24 hours of his election, the Illinois Democrat assigned a team of campaign…

This article provides a rationale and related practical suggestions for using literature as a support system for social-emotional development as children cope with the stresses, anxieties, and feelings of loss that can occur in family life. The authors discusses types of books, how to choose them, and how teachers can use authentic literature to…

Booktalking authentic multicultural literature can encourage students to read, promote respect for all cultures, and help make all students feel welcome in libraries and media centers. It also provides opportunities to collaborate with teachers to increase diversity throughout the schools. This article presents selected booktalks of contemporary…

Academics can be found all over the Internet commiserating about academic bullying, including on "The Chronicle's" own forums and blogs. There are debates over how to resolve bullying, warnings to other scholars, and even primal cries for help. This article describes three blogs on bullying: (1) Historiann (http://www.historiann.com); (2) On…