How Novice Teachers Talk About Teaching Writing

@font-face { font-family: Cambria ; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Times New Roman ; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } This microethnographic study investigates the classroom interactions and demonstration teaching sessions of novice English language teachers in a M.S.Ed.-TESOL course on teaching writing. The purpose of this investigation is to examine how novice language teachers integrate theory and practice in teaching writing to English language learners during routine interactions in a teacher-education course. First, it examines how novice English language teachers interpret the theory and research presented in a M.S.Ed.-TESOL course on teaching writing. Specifically, it investigates what theory and research are presented to novice language teachers and how they then select among and reinterpret course subject matter, based on their own pre-existing ideas and based on their professional goals and aspirations. Second, the study examines how novice English teachers enact research-based theories of writing pedagogy. Focusing on demonstration teaching sessions, the structure and content of the demonstration teaching activity is analyzed. Student behavior during these demonstration teaching sessions reveals their interpretation of the subject matter being enacted. Findings from this study may help language teacher educators to craft curricula that better address the issues of socializing novice teachers to make theory-practice connections. Furthermore, this study also contributes to our knowledge of how theories of writing are interconnected with actual teacher practices, and thus may lead to theory construction in the field of rhetoric and composition

Measurable Gender Differences in Moral Standards

In 1982, Carol Gilligan tested Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning claiming that his research favored men. Lawrence Kohlberg limited his research to studying 75 boys from adolescents through young adulthood (Kohlberg, 1981). His theory of moral reasoning stemmed from that research. The purpose of this project was to test Carol Gilligan’s claims that women have different moral tendencies than men. The hypothesis for this study was that there would be measurable differences between the way men and women judge different scenarios. The survey used for this study was the Defining Issues Test 2 which included demographic information created by James Rest in 1975. Statistical significance was found in the difference between men and women in their moral tendencies. This was distinguished by comparing the participants’ genders and type indicator. The results of this study supported Carol Gilligan’s claim that women and men do indeed have different moral tendencies. It was found that men and women approach moral scenarios in a different manner

Experiential Learning in Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this research is to answer two primary questions regarding education and a student's engagement in the classroom: does depth of experience influence student engagement, and does sequence of experience influence student engagement. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected in a previous study from students in two classroom sequences: one, a traditional classroom setting, and the other a field experiment on the west coast of the U.S. Bandura's social cognitive theory was used to understand the relationship between students, their behavior, and different learning environments. Observations, journals and test scores were sources of data implemented to understand student's critical thinking ability and learning styles after the overall experience

Gendered interventions: narrative discourse in the Victorian novel

(print) xvii, 246 p. : ill. ; 24 cmPreface, vii -- Acknowledgments, xvii -- PART I. Proposing a Model : Feminism and Narratology -- Ch. 1. Introduction : Why Don't Feminists 'Do' Narratology? 3 -- Ch. 2. A Model of Gendered Intervention: Engaging and Distancing Narrative Strategies 25 -- PART II. Testing the Model: Interventions in Texts -- Ch. 3. Engaging Strategies, Earnestness, and Realism : Mary Barton 47 -- Ch. 4. Distancing Strategies, Irony, and Metafiction : Yeast and Vanity Fair 72 -- Ch. 5. Women's Narrators Who Cross Gender : Uncle Tom's Cabin and Adam Bede 101 -- Ch. 6. Men's Narrators Who Cross Gender : Can You Forgive Her? and Bleak House 134 -- PART III. Reflecting upon the Model : Gendered Interventions in History -- Ch. 7. The Victorian Place of Enunciation : Gender and the Chance to Speak 159 -- Ch. 8. Direct Address and the Critics : What's the Matter with "You"? 192 -- Notes, 207 -- Works Cited, 223 -- Index, 23

Guilt by Association: United States Ties and Vulnerability to Transnational Terrorist Attacks

Do nations' allies and trading partners affect their vulnerability to transnational terrorist attacks? Prior research has focused on how the attributes of individual nations, such as regime type, economic stability, and international power, affect their likelihood of being the target of transnational terrorist attacks. However, prior research has not addressed the impact of a nation's economic and foreign policy ties on this phenomenon. Specifically, the question I ask is whether terrorists attempt to indirectly affect the status quo policy stance of a powerful nation by attacking the allies and trading partners of that nation. I develop a theoretical framework to explain why terrorists are likely to target allies of powerful nations in the international arena to force the more powerful nation to change its policy stance. Focusing on the United States, I examine how a nation's economic and foreign policy ties to the U.S. affect its vulnerability to transnational terrorist attacks. I test my expectations using the ITERATE database of transnational terrorist events from 1968 to 2000. The results suggest that a nation's economic and foreign policy ties may have a significant impact on its vulnerability to transnational terrorism

Self/image: reading the visual in Atwood's fictive autobiographies

Margaret Atwood's extensive back catalogue includes a group of fictive autobiographies, each engaged in a self-reflexive consideration of the problems involved in writing a life story. These fictive meta-autobiographies consciously critique any act of self-representation within narrative in a radical challenge to phallogocentric models of life-writing and truth-telling. This group of texts (including Cat's Eye [1988], Lady Oracle [1976], The Handmaid's Tale [1985], and The Blind Assassin [2000], as well as some of Atwood's poetry) also incorporates a dominant use of visual images, particularly photographs: each extending questions involving the "real," the "copy," origination, attribution, and authority. These questions open up new ways of considering how text and image conspire to defer certainty in the objective and subjective "real," as Atwood's visual texts prove to be as duplicitous as the language through which they are narrated. This article connects with critical accounts of life-writing and with Susan Sontag's reflections on photography in order to discuss the status of the visual image as an agent of representation within any autobiographical account

Four applications of embodied cognition

This article presents the views of four sets of authors, each taking concepts of embodied cognition into problem spaces where the new paradigm can be applied. The first considers consequences of embodied cognition on the legal system. The second explores how embodied cognition can change how we interpret and interact with art and literature. The third examines how we move through archi- tectural spaces from an embodied cognition perspective. And the fourth addresses how music cogni- tion is influenced by the approach. Each contribution is brief. They are meant to suggest the potential reach of embodied cognition, increase the visibility of applications, and inspire potential avenues for research