Developing Children’s Critical Response to Poetry

This account of an action research project describes how children in two schools became inspired to read poetry by developing their abilities to make critical response by offering them greater freedom of choice and providing opportunities to share ideas with each other. The children who participated in the study were mixed groups of years 4, 5 and 6. As a classroom practitioner I have always enjoyed sharing poetry with children and encouraging children to read and enjoy poetry for pleasure. I know, from personal experience, how much children enjoy the varied experiences of poetry but my own observations and NLT research indicate that reading poetry for pleasure has been falling steadily, from 30% of readers choosing this genre in 2005 to just below 15% in 2012. (Clark 2012

The three ring self : Robert Penn Warren\u27s circus aesthetic and southern intertextuality

This dissertation analyzes the extent to which Robert Penn Warren’s 1947 novella “The Circus in the Attic” and his use there in of the circus trope establish a matrix for his fiction, poetry, essays, and literary criticism and align his canon with the selected works of several authors of the Southern Renaissance, including William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Ralph Ellison. All of these authors observed the American circus in its heyday during the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, by the end of World War I, the process of the circus’s cultural rehabilitation had begun; its growing conservatism was manifested by its support of traditional American values during the 1920s, through the Great Depression, and finally through World War II years that correspond with the production of some of the greatest works of the Southern Renaissance. The circus’s growing conservatism was consistent with its use by writers of the Southern Renaissanceas an image for the mythic, patriarchal Old South and the cultural stagnation that results firom one’s allegiance to it, especially in light of moral imperatives to adapt to the New South. Robert Penn Warren’s canon is particularly driven and informed by the image of the circus. Readers encounter its most developed use in his novella “The Circus in the Attic,” although circus-related structures, themes, and characters from the novella also appear in Warren’s biographical studies, poetry. social commentary, and literary criticism. Warren’s extensive use of the circus reveals an awareness of his complex personal relationships and creative goals, he is the child of the south who finds his future threatened by its historical legacy as well as the artist of the south whose clarity of vision threatens to alienate him from his region, he is an author whose artistic goals establish his affinity with the mainstream North even as they reveal his insights into the southern way of life, finally, he is a twentieth-century writer whose appropriation of the circus, an image that had already been claimed for different purposes by literary modernism, refines the image to affect his vision of southern modernism

Local perceptions of sustainability indicators: issues of scale and implications for management

A key factor impacting upon sustainable development are the perceptions people hold of their local social, economic and ecological environment. These perceptions influence how communities fashion the local landscape and in turn help to condition the ways people adapt themselves to their local spatial realities. Implicit in these perceptions are indicators of sustainability that may or may not be integrated across the social, economic and ecological realms. Further, these local indicators may not accord with those adopted at the national or global scale. Accordingly, spatial scale presents a particular set of challenges in identifying appropriate indicators of sustainability. In the same way that aggregated changes at a local scale influence sustainability on a broad scale, national and global externalities profoundly affect perceptions relating to sustainable development at the finest of spatial scales. This paper focuses on one aspect of the issue of scale in sustainable indicator selection: local perceptions of sustainability. In this paper we report on a survey of perceptions of sustainability conducted across thirty-two sub-catchments in three major catchments in south west Victoria. We sought to uncover what people within each sub-catchment perceived as socially, economically and ecologically sustainable. Responses were compared across sub-catchments to determine whether perceptions at the sub-catchment scale were shared across the region. The results indicate that perceptions of sustainability varied between sub-catchments, which means that perceptions relating to sustainability at the regional scale may mask local trends. <br /