Interview with Dr. David Mulroy: Author of The War Against Grammar
  David Mulroy

This month, we bring you an insightful interview with Dr. David Mulroy, whose upcoming book, The War Against Grammar, will be published on August 28, 2003 by Heinemann/Boynton-Cook. (paper, 125 pages).

"There is a set of misguided assumptions about teaching grammar that has created a downward spiral. The notion that speaking standard English correctly has no intrinsic value is one of the fallacies; another is the belief that grammatical understanding has no practical value. This leads to neglect of grammar in schools of education. With each passing year, there are fewer teachers who can diagram sentences and identify parts of speech. Hence their students learn less and less."

Join us as we discuss his new book, the Classics, grammar instruction, and the state of higher education.   full text

Editor's Note:
  Karen Heise

The View From Here:
Lynne Fukuda

Who are this issue's contributors?

Spirit of the Times: A Design Lesson in Thinking
  Marcy L. Koontz, Ph.D.

Thinking critically and creatively is a skill taught in every academic discipline. When learning a new skill, it must be practiced over and over by students and constantly evaluated by instructors. The specific discipline of apparel design is complex, requiring students to learn a variety of new, practical skills ranging from flat-pattern design to computer-aided design. Many apparel design skills require a hands-on learning environment and the use of specific tools to accomplish certain tasks . In contrast, students also have to learn to develop their thinking skills, which is often a challenge for both student and instructor. This paper demonstrates how a five-step process was created and implemented to assist students in learning how to think critically and creatively within a fashion illustration course.   full text

David Wilde
  Poetry

Lukiv's Educational Stew, Ingredient 1of 5: What Can the Student Imagine?
  Dan Lukiv

Close your eyes and imagine a scene. It's your scene, so it doesn't have to include me and others screaming as they bounce along whitewater chaos, enjoying the spray and sting and jerk in the soaking cavity of a twisty river raft. Your imagination in gear, leave rationality, or call it conformity, linearity, and left-brain bear-trap logic (Rico, 1983), behind. The New Illustrated Webster's Dictionary calls imagination "the constructive or creative faculty, expressed in terms of images which either reproduce past experiences or recombine them in ideal or creative forms" (1992, p. 483).

Egan (2003) argues "the imagination is the ability to think of things as possibly being so" and that "it is a hard-working core of children's thinking". He also argues that it can "be blown away with the growth of rationality" (p. 2). How can the teacher help the forces of rationality stand at bay for at least part of each school day to allow students the opportunity to exercise their imaginations?   full text

Call for Papers