Lukiv's Educational Stew, Ingredient 5 of 5:
A Thief in the Family
  Dan Lukiv

Why is our dog a thief?

Yesterday morning, on my way to my Neon Sport, as I toted an armful of marked papers for my grade three students, I tripped over a welder's helmet. The papers flew up, and I crashed.

With my wind knocked out, I sat on dewy grass, beside Toby, our gargantuan brown mongrel. He licked my face.

I didn't yell at him. I certainly didn't want to attract any neighbour's attention, and so, once I'd felt my strength returning, I dumped the helmet in our shed, where many other items--stolen items--lay in a heap: a glove, an assortment of toy cars, a Cabbage Patch doll, a baseball, a pair of runners, a sweater, a shoe, and a pair of boxer shorts.

Who owned these things? How would I return them?

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The Teaching of Cultural Theory in the Composition Classroom
  Anushiya Sivanarayanan

The ubiquitous research paper assignment - a writing exercise that has found an unshakeable niche in many high school and college composition classes - requires the writer to show proof of academic literacy. The assignments typically call for expertise in documentation, integrating quotations into the text, identifying, evaluating and organizing multiple sources for research, and avoiding any form of obvious plagiarism. Most popular handbooks on college-level research paper writing have whole chapters on paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, quoting, and writing bibliographies. The whole exercise in writing the research paper is justified in terms of inducting students into the halls of arcane academia by teaching them a whole new set of rhetorical skills in argumentation.

The problem with the mostly skill-based orientation of research paper writing is the narrow definition it gives to academic literacy. Most students in the early stages of their academic career associate research and scholarship with matters of form, but students quickly realize that in order to do justice to any kind of academic writing, they need to be familiar with certain theoretical frameworks that most of their teachers seem to take for granted.

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Gifted Education Research Practices Recommended in Doctoral Dissertations
  Theresa Monaco

Recent research that promotes effective education inclusion practices often examine curriculum and strategies that produce academic results. The classroom is organized to facilitate free movement with challenging materials and a sense for evaluation of daily progress. The curriculum is offered as a teaching/learning process that produces academic results. Research that looks at the affective components considers the psychological, emotional, and social needs of gifted students. Research that combines the effective and affective inclusion education components also examines the value added component of gifted programs. Buckner outlines the elements that make an inclusion classroom a practical idea in the elementary classroom. Smutny advocates curriculum compacting as a starting point to ensure that students need not be taught concepts for which they have demonstrated competence. The above research is often the basis of examining current school problems.

Six graduate researchers started with a curiosity about a problem encountered while working with gifted students and the process of identifying solutions to problems that affect the lives of gifted students. The results of the studies of this article are the basis for recommendations for teachers and administrators.

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