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Purpose This paper is an exploration of the potential impact of narrative writing and creative non-fiction on historical scholarship. Framed by the question of where a manuscript would be shelved in the library, this paper aims to survey the role of space, physical and metaphorical, in how we categorize, curate, cultivate and present narrative scholarship.Design/methodology/approach Using primary source material related to Newark stadium building and a broad-range scholarship concerning space, the author will place them in conversation with historian John Demos’ autobiographical narrative writing style.Findings The author hopes this paper furthers the conversation on the impact of narrative on scholarly writing and literacy.Originality/value By advancing this conversation, the author’s hope is that scholars will expand the possibilities of topics, sources, analysis, narrative styles and presentation of the information they both find and produce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study examined a five-day summer professional development workshop for English language arts teachers on argument writing. Fourteen teacher participants learned from five different professionals who discussed the role of argument in their fields. Teacher blog posts were coded to understand what teacher participants perceived as important to or different from their previous understandings. Findings include (a) authentic argument is as much about an attitude or state of mind as it is about a product on paper; (b) in schools, argument instruction is very focused on structure; (c) research and data are essential to argument outside of schools; and (d) authentic argument has consequences. These findings have implications for those teaching argument writing as an authentic act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon an explanation of the proleptic, an understanding of time as being socially constructed within specific contexts, to interpret a series of dramatic sequences enacted in ethnodramatic pedagogy. The authors present two major arguments: (1) teachers can help students analyze the processes that influence and shape their identities by adopting a proleptic framework; (2) ethnodrama, a dramatic and dialogic approach to interpreting texts, creates an opportunity for students to evaluate the social forces that shape identity construction as they situate and reflect on texts within multiple contexts. The authors delineate the ways in which teachers can use ethnodrama to help students revise their understandings of the personal and cultural implications of texts by situating these understandings in different configurations of place, space, and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the relevant research that highlights the impact of pairing fiction and nonfiction texts around a specific theme or a topic for enhanced motivation and reading comprehension for English learners (ELs), this article describes ways to combine texts of various genres to promote ELs' language and literacy development. A middle school example of a lesson on chocolate exemplifies how pairing a number of fiction and nonfiction texts supports differentiation and multiple opportunities for writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many students have experienced author visits, but one K–4 elementary school aimed to meet its school improvement goal to motivate writers through a yearlong collaboration with a published children's book author/illustrator, Ryan Hipp. This article details the positive components of the yearlong collaboration that included three in‐person sessions and blog posts. Transcribed observations of the assemblies, readings of the blog, and transcribed pre‐ and poststudy interviews of nine teachers, 36 students, and Hipp revealed that collaboration with him triggered and maintained situational interest. Students were interested in writing and motivated to write because of Hipp's influence, and the constant connection with the author/illustrator helped ensure the success of the collaboration. Teaching implications of author visits are detailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Many students plagiarize unintentionally. Students are told that plagiarizing is claiming someone else's ideas or information as their own, and they are told to cite sources because failure to do so is dishonest and plagiarism has serious consequences. So, students are told to paraphrase, not plagiarize, but are they taught explicitly how to paraphrase? Even when a writer summarizes a source, plagiarism can result if the writer stays too close to the wording or sentence structure of the original source. Plagiarism can be avoided through students’ use of the RRLC (read, reread, list, compose) strategy. When students use the RRLC strategy to compose a summary and to paraphrase content from a bulleted list, they write using their own unique syntax, thus avoiding plagiarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Building a better public education system for our children begins with providing students with real‐world learning experiences from the very beginning. To this end, the authors explored how two kindergarten teachers scaffolded scientific literacy learning using an authentic multimodal text before, during, and after a zoo field trip in ways that fostered the identity of kinder “scientists” along with good literacy skills. From their experiences, public educators can help their students develop strong science knowledge and scientific literacy through rich literacy practices intertwined with learning science content, over a period of time, with multiple, varied, and scaffolded uses of an authentic, multimodal text and paired with authentic, out‐of‐school learning experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This Teaching Tip describes the use of children's literature to help second‐grade students meet Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and for Mathematics. During a shared reading experience, students used manipulatives to represent plot and characters while demonstrating mathematical reasoning. The article offers instructional ideas, guiding questions, authentic student work samples, and a rationale for using children's literature and mathematics manipulatives to help students make connections across disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the facts and creative nonfiction for a self narrative and of others. It cites on the explanation of English Professor Jim W. Corder that every narrator selectively invent and have their own boundaries in their narrative. The article also examines the differences when nuance of their written goes unexamined, citing its complex capacity to worldviews.

In most elementary schools, students spend more time reading and writing narrative texts and less time with informational texts. Yet, the Common Core State Standards advocate that informational texts comprise nearly half of K-8 students' entire academic reading, including content areas like science and social studies. The authors propose remixing informational writing with literature, new literacies, and scientific content as a way to mitigate the divide between narrative and expository texts. This article describes an instructional approach for integrating informational reading and writing with scientific content knowledge by: (1) reading and analyzing mentor texts, (2) furthering scientific understanding through Internet Workshops and (3) teaching students how to interpret and transform scientific content by composing informational poetic riddles, or as students prefer to call them, ' What Am I?' riddles. This instructional approach can serve as a model and scaffold for teachers to use with other integrated units and Internet Workshops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to recently published national standards, elementary students should engage in engineering design activities. This article outlines ways that teachers can use literacy instruction to support young students' engineering design activity, such as by selecting texts in which characters face problems that can be solved through engineering, providing students with opportunities to practice comprehension strategies while reading those texts, and modeling for them how to write a variety of texts that are relevant to engineers' practices. The authors describe how they integrated this type of literacy instruction into engineering units in third- and fifth-grade classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development and institution of the Common Core Standards, teachers must be prepared to integrate content areas such as social studies within the language arts curriculum. Teachers following the suggestions of the Common Core Standards should develop practical and meaningful strategies within their classrooms that encourage and support writing and reading instruction along with content area skills and knowledge. Traveling books promote the integration of writing, reading, and the social studies while also fostering the home-school connection which is evidenced to stimulate students' early childhood development, both academically and socially. Suggestions are made for utilizing traveling books including an outline of the processes to follow to create class traveling books. Examples are given using this strategy for the integration of literacy, writing, Common Core standards, and the home-school connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As teachers organize classroom schedules to meet curricular demands and time constraints, they strive to seek ways to motivate and sustain student engagement in quality vocabulary instruction, enjoyable learning experiences, and interesting informational books. This article addresses these concerns and describes a vocabulary acquisition strategy called the Generative Vocabulary Matrix (GVM). The GVM is an interactive concept organizer that scaffolds student engagement in meaning-making discourse to develop background knowledge. Teacher teams applied research on motivation and literacy to design a disciplinary science unit using a GVM as a tool for supporting conceptual understanding within a Learning Workshop context. Because learning activities resembled the language and practices that experts actually use in their field, including drawing from a richly structured schema, the GVM supports a disciplinary literacy approach for young learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]