In this article we examine the development, over 1 year, of mathematical discourse communities in 2 eighth-grade mathematics classes in a suburban public middle school. The curriculum topics included probability, functions, graphing, data analysis, and pre-algebra. The 50 students were heterogeneously placed; most were from upper-middle-class…

Educators have come to recognize the importance of their efforts in building students' social and emotional skills. However, the creation of lasting programming often fails to keep pace with educators' best intentions. In this article, the authors suggest guidelines for ways in which school counselors can be involved in implementing sustained…

Researchers and teachers often are not privy to the literacy events smuggled into the private lives of urban African-Americans. Yet, these hidden literacies, such as journal writing and reading personal business letters, often reveal deft rhetorical skills as well as intellectual grappling with the social complexities of power, race, and class.…

The advent of mass media in the twentieth century creates certain "ruptures," as Michel Foucault would say, in the perceptual world of human beings as they go about the everyday business of coping with a technological culture grounded in human perception as the rule for expression. Foucault proposes that people watch two…

Noting that a number of Australian states have adopted a functional model of language in their English syllabus documents, this PEN explains the term "functional model" and explores the implications of a functional approach to the teaching of English across all key learning areas in the Australian primary classroom. The paper notes that…

Recent discussions of teaching composition in the context of cultural studies have begun to consider the condition of the writing subject in society, yet these discussions construct student-writer S(s)ubject(ivitie)s at the poles of modernist-identity and postmodern-difference binary opposition that is politically problematic. The identity of the…

Many scholars have examined the jeremiad in American rhetoric and political discourse. The Hanford Education Action League (HEAL), which influenced policy changes in the operations of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, is a social movement organization whose founding members used the jeremiad to create a symbolic community which…

John Swales, well-known proponent and definer of genre theory, sees the writing process as recursive as well as heuristic, emphasizing that the text is created by a writer, who is a member of a discourse community, influenced by that community's traditions, discourse conventions, textual and topic requirements and constraints. Debate among genre…

A study examined the opinions of a substantial segment of the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) community about gender exclusive language. Questionnaires were distributed at two large but diverse CEDA debate tournaments. A total of 180 usable surveys were returned to the 390 distributed. Survey respondents (112 men, 66 women) included…

Teachers' written responses to student writing cover a wide range, and through the kind and amount of response, they convey their values, beliefs, and priorities about language and learning, about the roles of teacher and student, and about the goals of writing. Researchers have found that students respond well to comments on concepts and…

The awakening of public interest in curriculum has come at a time when, within the education profession, the conventional wisdom about teaching and learning has itself undergone a major transformation. New Constructivist theories of knowing have emphasized the social nature of the construction of knowledge: students learn by "putting it into…

A graduate student who was the only composition person in a two semester teaching seminar experienced the dilemma of defining and establishing that identity in the midst of a classroom struggle between cultural studies and literary theorists on one side and creative writers on the other. The factious teaching seminar mirrored the fact that English…

A study explored what an outside-the-classroom, authentic literature discussion involved. Three book club discussions (involving a leaderless group consisting of members of varying professions meeting monthly to discuss fiction and nonfiction reading selections) were audiotaped, transcribed and coded. Results indicated that: (1) when allowed to…

This paper explores what it means, and what it might mean, to "achieve" in literacy. The paper points out that, although there is considerable concern over the misrepresentation of literate achievement by standardized tests, there has been substantially less demonstration of what is being left out, that is, exactly what of significance is achieved…

Holocaust denial, like hate speech in general, is reaching far larger audiences on the World Wide Web that it was ever able to do in the past. The Internet is the most free press imaginable, and Holocaust deniers can publish their works as widely as they like and construct their message in any way they choose--they have great latitude when…