Getting English Class Started©

Dan Lukiv, M.Ed.
English and Creative Writing
McNaughton Centre, Quesnel, BC, Canada
E-mail: lukivdan@shaw.ca

Introduction

    In my school, McNaughton Education Centre (Quesnel, BC), I teach English, Communications, and Creative Writing to secondary alternate high school students, many of whom abhor reading and writing. Often I have asked students, “Do you mean you have never read a book? Not ever?”

    A typical response: “I’ve never read a book. I hate reading.”

    My starting off class with their reading Dickens’ David Copperfield won’t work. I don’t think their reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake will work either. That said (I feel a little laugh coming on), I remind myself of a song that my daughters sang in kindergarten:  It begins with “inch by inch, row by row, I’m gonna make this garden grow.”

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“And After the Death of Joshua” ©

Dan Lukiv, M.Ed.
English and Creative Writing
McNaughton Centre, Quesnel, BC, Canada
E-mail: lukivdan@shaw.ca

1.
Adonibezek, 284 thumbs and
Big toes belonged to you, such
A great king you were. But they
Have been cut off, like mighty
Men of battle decapitated. You have
Become one of the lesser kings that
Clamoured for crumbs
Beneath your table. How Athena,
Goddess of war,
Would have applauded your wisdom!—
If only her stone arms could have moved!

Have your amputations removed
Your grip on Jehovah, upset your
Walk before this God of prophets
Long dead? You said, “God has
Repaid me.” How you tripped as you ran
From Judah and Simeon. Who
Broke your bow and dumped out
Your quiver of arrows?
Who ruined your grip?
Who is this Jehovah that Rahab
Learned about after he’d humiliated
The gods of Egypt?

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Now It Came About in the Days When the Judges©

Dan Lukiv, M.Ed.
English and Creative Writing
McNaughton Centre, Quesnel, BC, Canada
E-mail: lukivdan@shaw.ca

1.
Naomi, wife of dead Elimelech,
In the days of 12 saviours, you
Escaped drought and famine
In Moab, but not widowhood,
Nor did you find comfort in the
Strength of Mahlon, the one who
Grows weak, nor in Chilion, the
One failing. O your buried sons!
Naomi—“Pleasantness” sang your
Hebrew root, but Mara—
“O bitterness” you became. Cymbals
Clashed out your consonants. History
Records your empty womb
And ripe humiliation,
But the loving-kindness of your God
Will wrap you in Ruth’s heart
And give you, like the widow of
Zarephath, a better place in time.

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Real World Ethics in the Tech Comm Classroom

Bethany Blankenship, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
University of Montana Western
E-mail: b_blankenship@umwestern.edu

After teaming up with our university’s Marketing Office for a service learning project, my Technical and Professional Communications class and I discovered an ethical slip on our university’s website.  Later discussions would reveal that by inviting the real world into our classroom, I unwittingly invited in a complex situation that would serve as an excellent teacher of ethics.
           
Gordon*, the director of the Marketing Office, and I decided the students would write short articles for the university’s website. While researching their articles, students read and discussed the text Letting Go of the Words, a great book on web writing by Ginny Redish. Gordon visited the class twice, lecturing on the articles’ formatting and giving the students tips on taking good pictures for the web. One of Gordon’s work study students, Amanda (her real name) was enrolled in the class, and she also worked with her classmates to prepare them for their writing assignments. In short, the collaboration was working well. The students had a real audience to write to, and they were learning about web writing from a professional in the field.

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YouTube, Wikis, Blogs, OH MY:
Plugging in the 19th Century Humanities Classroom
to 21st Century Undergraduate Literacy and Language Practices

Christine Boyko-Head, Ph.D.
National Faculty
Creative Arts in Learning
Lesley University, Cambridge MA
E-mail:  cboyko@mountaincable.net

Any elementary or high school teacher can attest to the prevalence of disengaged students in their schools. Research indicates that disengagement manifests itself in many ways and ranges from hostile behavior to total student withdrawal in the classroom (Delamount 2000, Black, 2004, Raffini, 1986). As a result of this extensive research, dedicated educators of children and adolescents have been utilizing various methods of and approaches to re-engagement. (Keith 1999, Mulcahey 2000, Peterson 2003, Payne 2005, Diket 2003).  The issue of disengagement within the post-secondary classroom, however, is not as well addressed. At the post-secondary level, administrators and faculty are responding to and prioritizing the 21st Century market demands of adult learners by developing new methods of course delivery. These new methonds include hybrid and on-line courses. But, with new advances come new challenges, albeit some challenges are merely old issues in disguise. For instance, current research evinces there now exists disengaged online, adult learners (Chyung, 2001).  Hence, researchers are turning their attention to solving this new brand of disengaged student.

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Gaze in the Classroom

Greta Shenk
Undergraduate, Senior
English and Secondary Education
Eastern Mennonite University
Email: greta.shenk@emu.edu

“That’s the news from Lake Wobegone,” Garrison Keillor ends his monologue on the radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”  In an unconventional move, Keillor has reordered the traditional emphasis on men as achievers and women as objects.  In a 1994 essay, Sonja K. Foss and Karen A. Foss explore several ways that Keillor’s radio monologues subvert a single-perspective, male-dominated narrative tradition.  Their analysis hinges on the critical terms “male gaze” and “female gaze,” a distinctive theoretical lens often applied to film and literature or, in this case, radio monologues.  The analytical leap from fully processed and mediated film or press to the somewhat spontaneous vocal delivery of story, inspires the further freeing of gaze analysis from set media forms into the wider world of interpersonal interactions.  Specifically, this essay seeks to analyze the university classroom as the setting for the practice of male and female gaze.  In most classrooms, teachers establish the gaze perspective of their instruction through their actions and words, as either male, female, or a mash-up of the two, which translates into specific student-teacher interaction roles.

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A Critical Assessment of Four Websites
Relevant to the Study of Comparative Education Systems

Ernest Williamson, III
Ph.D. candidate in Higher Education
Seton Hall University
E-mail: williaea@shu.edu

Why study comparative education?  According to Dr. Craig Kissock, a distinguished professor of education at the University of Minnesota, “an expected result of our comparative study of education in different societies is that we will formulate reflective and defensible opinions about education in our own lives, concerning our local schools, and about educational policies in our nation and world” (Kissock).  Globalization, post-modernization and post-colonialism are issues in the future development of comparative and international research in education.

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