Language Arts - Changing The Way We Think About Language Arts Revisited, Jul 2001

In this article, Wilson-Keenan, Solsken, and Willett illustrate how classroom talk that includes students, families, and teachers can create spaces in which students from diverse cultural backgrounds negotiate purposeful literacy practices.

Memories of texture, color, and feel permeate this poetic reminiscence. What kinds of memories will our current generation of keyboarders have?… Thoughts of spongy keyboard action, the smell of the packaging on new software or hardware, or digitized color in thousands of pixels. Do these seem so far away from Sjostedt’s yearned-after silver, copper, and gold crayons?

In this article, Birch offers a challenge for language arts teachers to reconsider their beliefs about the teaching of written grammar.

The arts and language arts are mutually supportive. Music is a natural form of listening to language; theater is the mechanism for performing language; and art is a way of visualizing language. The arts, rather than being a “frill” unrelated to literacy learning, are media of human innovation and conceptualization that offer alternative ways to construct meaning and to communicate ideas. As such, the arts can be a powerful avenue to the language arts for young children.

Mello’s study of boys’ and girls’ conversations about traditional folktales reveals the power of stories to “furnish students with a broader cultural lens in which to view the world.”

In this action research project, Silvers and a teacher researcher use literature discussion as a vehicle for encouraging fourth-grade students to reflect critically on injustice in their own lives.

In this article, Gutiérrez examines “the ways in which we have not taken up social and cultural understandings of the teaching and learning of literacy.”

Karen Gallas was the first teacher in 68 years to be asked to give a keynote address at the National Conference of Researchers on Language and Literacy (NCRLL), held in Milwaukee in November 2000. Language Arts presents here the text of that speech.

In their final issue, the editors review three versions of educational reform: the professionalization of teachers; over-regulation of teachers’ work; and the deregulation of schooling, arguing that over-regulation and deregulation work together as part of a larger market-oriented strategy for reform that seeks to limit the professional autonomy of classroom teachers. Finally, they speculate on how language arts educators might best resist destructive, market-oriented reforms of education.

This month’s Talking about Books column focuses on the depth of learning that happens when classroom teachers employ text sets for thematic teaching.

Reflects on the Mass Observation Project, an archive of written observations written by British citizens on various topics, which began in the 1930s and continuing to the present. Language Arts, too, is an archive of trends and a record of enduring issues. In this, their final issue, the editors urge readers and writers to change the way they look at Language Arts, the journal, and language arts.