Sally McMillan

Students' Stories: Adolescents Constructing Multiple Literacies through Nature Journaling.

The integration of nature studies within language arts instruction offers multiple possibilities for guiding students toward close readings of literature, their changing selves, natural phenomena, and the world around them. The authors document their own rediscovery of nature study and what happened when environmental observations were incorporated into the lives of 67 seventh-grade students as an alternative mode of literacy instruction.

Through the Looking Glass: Our Autoethnographic Journey Through Research Mind-Fields

Two curriculum professors team taught naturalistic inquiry in an education college where research is the domain of a “service” department. Within the seminar, participants were challenged and transformed. Within the college, pillars of traditional research cracked. Conflicting streams of criticism, support, and imposition emerged, as grievances were filed and emails were requisitioned. Legalized bullying abounded. However, students continued to request their classes, and traditional pillars continue to crack. This article explores core questions such as the following: Who has the right to teach research? What constitutes legitimate research? What roles do narrative and imposition play in knowing and being known? Using a performative format, with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass as literary and methodological tools, the authors attempt to include readers in their arduous and sometimes comical journeys through the academic adolescence of Wonderland and back again through the looking glass.

A Representative Journey of Teachers’ Perceptions of Self: A Readers’ Theater

In this chapter, the authors analyze current pre-service teachers’ reflections on the journals written by teachers from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. They explore what the interchange reveals about pre-service teachers’ conceptions of teaching and the learning-to-teach process. The analysis focuses on the commonalities and differences between these groups of teachers. Findings are presented in a readers’ theater format in which recurring themes and meaning-making are expressed by voices from the past and by those who would be teachers.

The Twelve Steps of Academic Adolescence

Prevalent throughout Western literature and culture, the journey motif weaves its way through tales of human growth—stories which grapple with the processes of how people come to be and to know. The most pervasive cultural understanding of the human quest emerges from Joseph Campbell’s summation of the archetypal monomyth, which centers around a young man who leaves home in search of adventure (Moore, 1997, p. 34; Tyler, 2001, p. 1).

Team Teaching Qualitative Research as Academic Mentorship

Collaborative teaching is not a new phenomenon. In public schools, especially at the middle level, interdisciplinary thematic teaching teams have shown the promotion of teaching-learning connections between subject areas, teachers and students (Hayes-Jacobs, 1989). For a variety of reasons, collaborative teaching has not followed suit at the higher education level. Bess (2000) suggests that the relative functions of university professors (teaching, research and service) attribute to the competitive, isolationist structure of our current system.