A Look Back at 2012
from NCTE INBOX 12-11-12
As the year winds down, let's look back at the INBOX Ideas to see what interested our readers the most. Here are the NCTE resources most opened by our readers:
From Classroom Notes Plus
Gloria Pipkin asks, "Why don't we devote some time during the last couple of weeks of school to promoting real summer reading? Not mandating or requiring or assigning but encouraging it." This article lists a few ways Pipkin has tried and some she'd like to try.
From College Composition and Communication
In "Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing" Malea Powell "listens closely" to the ways in which two late nineteenth-century American Indian intellectuals use the discourses about Indian-ness that circulated during that time period, in order to both respond to that discourse and to reimagine what it could mean to be Indian.
From College English
The authors of "Writing beyond the Curriculum: Fostering New Collaborations in Literacy" urge compositionists to reframe Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) to reach beyond university boundaries. They suggest problems and benefits that may accompany this change of orientation for writing programs.
From English Education
How can teachers use journals as part of their own growth and professional development? Read more in the English Education article "Sharing Journals: Conversational Mirrors for Seeing Ourselves as Learners, Writers, and Teachers."
From English Journal
Classroom management is an area in which teachers need to constantly adjust, change, and grow with their students. The article "Lessons about Motivation and Classroom Management" provides some advice and insights from interns in education.
From English Leadership Quarterly
With the theme "Technology Refresh," readers will find articles that speak both to a philosophical (and often conflicted) path toward the integration of technology in the classroom and to our practical approaches to incorporating it into meaningful and engaging instruction.
From Language Arts
Teachers and schools communicating with families and families communicating with schools and teachers add to the success of the school year. "Writing a Relationship: Home-School Journals" describes three teachers' use of journals in creating and maintaining a two-way dialogue with families and some of the results of this communication.
From Research in the Teaching of English
"Examining Digital Literacy Practices on Social Network Sites" follows the digital literacy practices of an undergraduate student.
From School Talk
"Conferring in the Writing Workshop," a themed issue, highlights advice from four experienced teachers of writing -- Ralph Fletcher, Carl Anderson, Joanne Hindley Salch, and Marianne Marino. They share responses that can be given to student writers which have been found to enable students to stretch their ability as writers.
From Talking Points
In "Connecting Students to Culturally Relevant Texts," Yvonne Freeman and David Freeman argue the importance of providing students with culturally relevant books and discuss their criteria for deciding if a book is culturally relevant to a particular child.
From Teaching English in the Two-Year College
In the article "Watch Out, Oprah! A Book Club Assignment for Literature Courses," a practice is described for incorporating more novels into community college literature courses and for sparking student interest in reading. The article presents a book club assignment that includes both collaborative activities and a group presentation.
From Voices from the Middle
Service-learning projects help teachers and students come together in new ways, demonstrate how language skills can help accomplish real-life tasks, and engage students in a way that spurs them to learn more thoroughly and quickly. "New Puzzles/Next Moves: Service-Learning: Using the Language Arts to Make a Difference" shares some lessons, project ideas, and outcomes.
Exploring Satire with The Simpsons uses an example from popular culture, The Simpsons, as a means to explore the literary technique of satire and to analyze a satirical work. Similarly, the movie Shrek introduces the satirical techniques of exaggeration, incongruity, reversal, and parody. Students brainstorm fairy tale characteristics, identify satirical techniques, then create their own satirical versions of fairy tales in Exploring Satire with Shrek.
What would you like to see more of in 2013? Share your ideas with us!
Sign up now for an RSS feed of each week's INBOX Ideas!