The View From Here:
Lynne Fukuda

Teaching Speech Communication Using Physical Activity

Joan E. Aitken, Ed.D.
Professor
Communication Arts
Park University
E-mail:  joan.aitken@park.edu

In preparation for a six-week summer program at an alternative high school, designing the 2.5 hour-blocks for each course loomed as a challenge. The students in the program attended an alternative high school due to a lack of success in attending a traditional high school.  Likewise, their need in attending a summer program arose from a lack of success in courses offered during the traditional academic year.  Additionally, these students had special needs due to learning difficulties or emotional and behavioral disorders.  In short, the students enrolled in this program were in need of something beyond the usual instruction they had been receiving.

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Relationship between Reading Ability and Achievement
in a Graduate-Level Research Methodology Course

Kathleen M. T. Collins, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
University of Arkansas at Fayetteville
E-mail: kcollinsknob@cs.edu

Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, PhD
Professor
Department of Educational Measurement and Research
College of Education
Sam Houston State University
E-mail: tonyonwuegbuzie@aol.com

Qun G. Jiao
The City University of New York
Baruch College, Newman Library
E-mail: gerry_jiao@baruch.cuny.edu

Although innumerable studies have been designed in the area of reading comprehension and reading ability from pre-kindergarten through undergraduate students, there have been limited investigations ascertaining the impact of graduates students’ reading ability on their academic performance. Given the notability of reading ability as a factor impacting the achievement levels of students in academic settings that require critical thinking skills (Brown, Fishco, & Hanna, 1993; Du Boulay, 1999; Onwuegbuze, Slate, & Schwartz, 2001; Pritchard, Romeo, & Muller, 1999; Zhu, 1999), this study sought to contribute to the extant research in this area by examining the relationship between reading ability of graduate students and their achievement in the context of a graduate level research methodology course.

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Performative Student Writing in the Cultural Studies Classroom

Linda S. Watts, PhD
Professor of American Studies
Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program
University of Washington, Bothell
E-mail:  lwatts@uwb.edu

In the twenty-first century it is almost commonplace to hear, particularly within programs, about the importance of student encounters with different voices and perspectives in their course-based reading experiences.  Required readings for such courses often feature unconventional prose by such contemporary writers as Toni Morrison, Susan Griffin, and Gloria Anzaldúa.  It is still comparatively seldom, however, that college courses invite undergraduate students to write in such a manner.  Although most educators recognize the value of multivocal and nonlinear texts as student readings, discussions of classroom practice rarely take up in explicit ways the corresponding importance of students registering those encounters with experimental texts through their own performative writing acts. With all their claims to diversity, multiplicity, and inclusion, our celebrated new pedagogies for the study of culture seem infrequently to address the implications of these curricular transformations for educator paradigms of student writing. Pedagogical innovations in terms of required reading content, while important, are not sufficient to achieve inclusive practice within the classroom. As educators, we need to rethink our approaches to devising writing assignments, altering and opening our views of the forms student response might fittingly take, or complicating our notions of what it might now mean to assign, respond to, and evaluate student writing.

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