Beyond Book Jackets: Creative Bulletin Boards to Encourage Reading

The rationale and application of creating bulletin boards is illustrated through three general bulletin board types

Welland Ontario’s Springfield Plan: Post-War Canadian Citizenship Training, American Style?

After World War II, minority activists and their Anglo-Canadian allies convinced the Ontario Ministry of Education to bring the Springfield Plan to Welland, Ontario, as a pilot project to combat racist and religious prejudice through the public school system. Pioneered in Springfield, Massachusetts, the Plan taught children the importance of tolerance by stressing that minority groups had made important contributions to the local community, the nation, and the world beyond. In Welland, however, the Plan only lasted for a few years because many influential Canadians failed to recognize the pervasiveness of discrimination, while non- British immigrants tended to see new industrial unions as better vehicles for claiming their rights. In addition, the Plan was unsuited to the understanding of Canada as a “bi-racial” country founded by the English and French.Après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, des militants issus des minorités et leurs alliés anglo-canadiens convainquirent le ministère de l’Éducation de l’Ontario d’introduire le Plan de Springfield à Welland (Ontario), à titre de projet pilote destiné à combattre le racisme et les préjugés religieux par l’intermédiaire du réseau d’écoles publiques. Lancé à Springfield (Massachusetts), celui-ci enseignait aux enfants l’importance de la tolérance en soulignant que les groupes minoritaires avaient apporté d’importantes contributions à la collectivité locale, au pays et au monde extérieur. À Welland, toutefois, le Plan ne dura que quelques années parce que bon nombre de Canadiens influents refusèrent de reconnaître l’omniprésence de la discrimination et que, de leur côté, les immigrants non britanniques eurent tendance à voir les nouveaux syndicats industriels comme de meilleurs outils pour faire valoir leurs droits. De plus, le Plan n’était pas conçu pour faire comprendre le Canada comme étant un pays « biracial », fondé par les Anglais et les Français.

Turning Contemporary Reading Research Into Instructional Practice

This article highlights four promising areas of contemporary reading research as well as the instructional practices implied by recent findings

Point-Counterpoint: Value of School Textbooks

Educators frequently are involved in textbook adoptions in various content areas, an important activity because textbook programs may define school curricula by dictating what is taught, in what sequence, and for how long. Recently, education groups have criticized school textbooks for being boring, incoherent, and dumbed-down. Viewed from one perspective the selection of new textbooks offers little hope for improving the school reading program because by their nature textbooks can inhibit the teaching of thinking. Viewed from a different perspective, textbooks offer the potential for much improvement in the reading program, if features of the text are used to the fullest with a critical approach. Educators looking to improve the reading programs in their schools may reasonably ask, What are the positive and negative values of using textbooks? This point-counterpoint discussion focuses on four issues involved in answering that question

History of Asian Americans

For our History of Asian Americans project, we aimed to creatively showcase some of the important topics discussed in the readings throughout this course. Additionally, our group related these historical topics to modern day issues or personal experiences. This was particularly interesting due to the current events taking place this semester like COVID-19, BLM Movement, and the election. In our project, we strayed away from summaries and explanations as much as possible while still providing context. We aimed to use our creative and critical thinking to highlight certain underlying aspects of the readings we thought were important, but may not have been the main point of the text. We made a couple of timelines to lay out big historical stories in a simpler understandable way. We included a variety of graphs to compare and contrast certain viewpoints or the experiences of different minority groups. Several illustrations were shown throughout our project to visualize these issues and analyze them artistically. Overall, we hope that we have provided a deeper connection to these historical characters and stories by making them relatable and personable to our readers. Although it would be nearly impossible to entirely express the hardships and discrimination faced by Asian Americans throughout history, we hope our readers gain some insight or a different outlook on all they have experienced throughout U.S history. Thank you and enjoy! Brittany Le, Christine Sivilay, and Mollie Fragerhttps://digital.sandiego.edu/ethn-zines/1010/thumbnail.jp

Individualized Vocabulary Instruction in Developmental Reading

Planned, individualized vocabulary instruction is an essential ingredient of developmental reading classes. The importance of the knowledge acquired through such instruct i on is underscored by re-examining just what it means to know a word. Although it is still not clear if Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell were left in a room for three hours, they could decide that they really knew the meaning of dog (Anderson and Freebody, 1981), it is certain that words symbolize concepts and that conceptual knowledge is a requisite for reading comprehension. As Roe, Stoodt and Burns (1983) explain, Words are labels for thoughts, ideas, concepts, and for the relationships among them; thus, words permit the manipulation of ideas

Falls Prevention Training at New York Presbyterian Hospital: Does Education Regarding Fall Prevention Reduce Incidence of Falls after Discharge to Home from an Acute Rehabilitation Facility?

The objective of this study was to determine the compared effectiveness of different instruction types for fall prevention training in an inpatient rehabilitation setting based on 6-month falls incidence. This study included 89 English-speaking patients aged 18-90 who participated in a fall prevention training program at New York Presbyterian Hospital’s inpatient rehabilitation center. Patients were divided into two class types, a group or an individual class. Both classes were subdivided into with and without a caregiver. A 10-Meter Walk Test, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and admission and discharge Functional Independence Measure (FIM™) scores were recorded for baseline comparisons among groups. MoCA scores less than 26 designated that a caregiver would be present during the training. Other patients had a caregiver present secondary to vision, speech/language, and hearing issues. Falls were measured over a 6-month follow-up period by phone interview. Results found no significant difference in age, gender, or cognition between fallers and non-fallers as well as no significant difference in fall incidence among different class types. These findings indicate that fall outcome was not affected by different types of training. However, the study did find that falls prevention training prior to discharge was effective in decreasing overall falls rate (25%) compared to previous studies (33%)