This journal serves the profession by providing a medium for the sharing of information, ideas, and concerns among teachers, administrators, researchers, and others interested in the early learning of languages. Articles in this volume include the following: "Foreign Language Teaching: What We Can Learn from Other Countries" (Ingrid U.…

During the 1990s, there was heightened awareness among early childhood researchers of the need to examine efforts to provide programs and services responsive to the needs and preferences of families of young children from diverse cultural and linguistic groups. This Digest presents strategies supported by the research literature to enhance…

This chapter reviews the literature on substance abuse and prevention efforts in Native communities. The first section describes demographic characteristics of America's indigenous people, including tribal and government definitions, interaction and validation styles, and rural-urban differences. It concludes by warning that use of broad ethnic…

This unit's multidisciplinary approach is well-suited to students in grades 7 through 9. "Life in Japan" is a unit of "Today's Japan": Learning Environment's three level series on Japanese culture. This resource is designed to help teachers with this effort. The program was developed in consultation with classroom teachers by a…

The Urban Teacher Training Collaborative (UTTC) is a school-university, school-based, Master of Arts in Teaching Program developed by Tufts University and three small Boston Public Schools. The program reflects partners' understanding of the needs of urban students and teachers. It presents an innovative model for teacher training similar to the…

Student teachers from Indiana University's Cultural Immersion Projects, who had been placed in K-12 schools on the Navajo reservation and in seven foreign countries, critically reflected on their home cultures, identifying key elements that defined who they were and shifts in their perceptions about home based on their experiences in culturally…

An American Indian (Arapaho) educator portrays various levels of student response and receptivity toward teaching from an Indigenous perspective by recounting some of his teaching experiences at universities in Montana, Canada, and Australia. A class of Native students who had to negotiate for their grades in a treaty written in Arapaho and…

Modern Western European ways of thinking are based on a print culture that uses verbal metaphors, and indigenous ways of thinking are based on an oral culture that uses visual metaphors. Visual metaphors provide a dominant mode of information processing and are used among indigenous groups to share cultural knowledge, yet Western culture is…

The Grad Rule 101 Web site is designed to help college and university faculty with instructional support relative to enhancing preservice teachers' knowledge, skills, and dispositions of the Minnesota Graduation Standards. It uses a variety of tasks that allow preservice teachers to become familiar with the structure, requirements, and…

This paper describes an action research project at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, that helps student teachers transform into teachers with developed cultural identities. Student teachers tend to be white, English-speaking females who are being prepared by educators much like them. The project encourages them to reflect on their beliefs…

A field-based teacher education program that is designed to educate preservice teachers for careers in urban schools is described. In this program preservice elementary school teachers spend two semesters in the classroom with veteran teachers before the traditional student teacher semester. In the second semester of the program, the preservice…

The guide is designed to familiarize adult basic education (ABE) English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers with the obstacles faced by adult students from other culture in the adult education classroom. An overview of these challenges and an outline of suggested teaching strategies and cultural activities are presented as a basis for developing…

This study examined challenges that Canadian educators faced when teaching aboriginal students in a large urban school. The study involved the school's principal, teachers, counselors, and coordinators of Aboriginal student programming. Participants, who were Aboriginal and Caucasian, completed semistructured interviews that examined personal…

This is the third report from the evaluation of the Multicultural Education Program in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), a major effort to address racial and ethnic diversity in a middle school. Section 1 of the report provides background on the multicultural education movement and the aims of the Pittsburgh program. Section 2 describes the status of the…

This monograph, informed by research on motivational and attitudinal perspectives of secondary school students learning foreign languages in the United Kingdom and Germany, provides information on how to motivate these students. The study focused on two factors that are central to the issue of motivation: the perceived usefulness and the perceived…