Describes how the author's 6 middle school students living in a village in the Yukon, 100 miles off the road system just below the arctic circle, enthusiastically wrote stories or poems about their lives. The students shared their works via an online electronic conferencing system with students from the unimaginably different landscape of the…

Investigates how technology can be integrated into existing secondary English language arts curricula in ways that avoid the perpetuation of social injustice, withstand inequalities, and resist false commercial ideologies. Describes preservice English teachers' web pages constructed in response to E. Anne Proulx's novel "The Shipping…

This learning activities notebook presents creative, elementary- and secondary-level, standards-based learning activities for teachers by teachers. They include a November-December teaching almanac, mathematics activities, language arts activities, science activities, and social studies activities. A reproducible sheet presents a Santa Sightings…

Describes the work of art titled "Aftermath" by Michael Olszewski, who has described it as the aftermath of intense anger. Includes background information on Olszewski. Includes activities in science and chemistry, art history, social studies/psychology, mathematics, visual arts, and language arts. (CMK)

The purpose of this manuscript is to describe how elementary teachers used their experiences in a storytelling inservice training to teach lessons in language arts, science, social studies, and bilingual education. Qualitative research methods were used in simultaneously collecting and analyzing data. Storytelling was found to be a valuable tool…

Coursebooks are an indispensable tool of the language arts instruction in elementary schools across California State. They are designed for teachers with precise indications of instructional practices, classroom social and participatory structures. However, these pre-designed practices are hardly evaluated for their appropriateness to meet…

This article examines two kinds of problems associated with the English Language Arts test at the fourth-grade level in New York State: (1) problems that inhere in the test itself and (2) problems associated with its use. As for the test itself, three kinds of problems are analyzed: (1) the use of multiple-choice tasks to assess reading…

In this article, the author builds on McHenry and Heaths study of the "literate" and the "literary" and McHenry's research on "forgotten readers" by examining the often undocumented literacy traditions and practices of men and women of African descent. First, the author traces the legacy of blended traditions of both written and spoken words in…

This article presents case studies of three adolescent girls' literacy-related school experiences over a three-year period, focusing on the girls' own accounts of their instructional and institutional interactions. Drawing on poststructural and constructivist theories of positioning and identity, we explore how particular resources were put into…

In this edition of Learning Connections, the authors show how technology can enhance study of weather patterns, reading comprehension, real-world training, critical thinking, health education, and art criticism. The following sections are included: (1) Social Studies; (2) Language Arts; (3) Computer Science and ICT; (4) Art; and (5) Health.…

The inspiration for this article was not conceived over lunch, but more specifically over the box in which the lunches were packaged. Five colleagues brainstormed ideas for teaching a unit on trees for the third grade that would fit in our boxes. The disciplines involved were art, children's literature, science, social studies, and technology.…

The study reported in this article delineates preservice teachers' perceptions of readiness to effectively teach elementary language arts before and after a site-based methods course. Their perceptions are also compared to those of inservice teachers in public elementary schools. Results indicate that perceptions of comfort and confidence for…

This piece was guided by the framing question "How can CEE [Conference on English Education] help its constituencies, the broader public, and policymakers understand the relationship between research and teaching?" The authors consider the usefulness of a range of empirical traditions; explore how expert language arts teachers read, conduct, and…

This interview study with 19 preservice teachers who were enrolled in a teacher apprenticeship program at a major southeastern U.S. university uses Dewey's (1938/1988) concept of an experience and Csikszentmihalyi's (1990) concept of flow to investigate how participants identify and describe aesthetic flow experiences both inside and outside…

This study examined whether distractor choices functioned differently for students without learning disabilities than they functioned for students with learning disabilities who received no accommodation, students with learning disabilities who received a read-aloud accommodation, and students with learning disabilities who received some form of…