One More Year To Remember
Dan Lukiv

march 1

a violet sky--
a comet spreads such white mist
above tree-dark hills

march 2

at the restaurant,
one lady pretends to not
listen to others

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At-Risk High School Students Mentor Elementary Students in Reading:
A Service-Learning Course Improves the Academic Needs of All
Dr. Jennifer Martin

The Benefits of Service-Learning                      

Service learning is a pedagogical technique where students learn to develop academic and social skills through active participation in student generated service experiences.  These service experiences: meet actual community needs, are coordinated by school and community, are integrated with academic curricula, provide students with opportunities to apply academic and social skills to real life situations in their communities, extend learning beyond the classroom thereby enhancing what is taught in the classroom, help to facilitate a sense of personal and civic responsibility and promote a sense of caring for others.  Actual service-learning experiences must also meet the following three criteria: that they involve purposeful civic learning, enhance academic learning, and promote relevant and meaningful service with the community (Howard, 2001).
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Making Research Magic for Muggles:
Harry Potter, the Multigenre Paper, and the College Composition Course
Karley Adney

It is the first day of the semester. Five minutes before the hour you enter the
room and greet your students and are shocked but pleased to see Neville Longbottom in the first row, Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnigan in the second, and Ron Weasely, Harry Potter, and Hermione Granger seated in the back by the door.  You distribute the syllabus and begin explaining the goals and expectations of the course when you notice your students hissing under their breaths and looking frightened.  In a moment of panic, you wonder what you did that has elicited such a reaction from your students; you have carefully avoided mentioning Slytherin, Snape, Umbridge, and, especially, Voldemort.  But then it comes to you: you said the word research.  It is true that many students dread conducting, analyzing, and writing research.  However, this feeling can be greatly
alleviated by building a research course around J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster series about
Harry Potter, as well as by offering students the option to write their papers either in
traditional essay or multigenre format.  
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Disabling the Canon
Tracey Colvin

The literary canon is considered by many to be a collection of the finest pieces of literature ever created. The canon is composed of resonant pieces of literature, works that help us refine and distill the essential elements of human experience; the canon allows us to define ourselves as we were, as we are, and as we hope to be. This collection of texts has been under scrutiny for many years, its exclusion of almost every marginalized group questioned and interpreted. In the 1970s, many women, among them theorist Annette Kolodny, demanded that the canon be adapted to include the work of previously disregarded female writers, arguing that these voices had been purposefully barred and that “What was at stake was not so much literature or criticism as such, but the historical, social, and ethical consequences of women’s participation in, or exclusion from, either enterprise” (499). Building on Kolodny’s claims, I add to the voices of dissention another group of marginalized, excluded authors: the disabled. If the canon represents the most significant works that best articulate human experience, the absence of disability within this framework is both startling and appalling.
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Dimensions of Dewey: Philosophy and Science
Kenneth McClelland

John Novak (1993) once made a prescient observation regarding the work of John Dewey. He said, “Dewey is like the Bible—often alluded to but seldom read…” I think this comment hits the mark and manages to capture a persistent problem in regards to the approach often taken toward the great intellectual figure that is John Dewey. Dewey is a philosopher that still looms large (fifty-three years after his death) within educational circles.  Educators must take a lot of the credit for keeping the philosopher’s name alive, but such credit comes also as a mixed blessing, for Dewey’s reception by educators has, since the 1950’s, involved a great deal of unwarranted reduction of his total body of work. Indeed, we educators all allude to John Dewey as the somewhat quaint progressive whose educational thinking had a great impact in the 1920’s and 30’s, but whose progressive vision has fallen out of fashion, the spirit of a bygone era. We tend to uncritically associate his name with the “Life Adjustment Movement,” one somewhat flawed expression of the progressive era’s experimentalism. Yet, we people working in education continue to allude to him as if out of homage to his once enormous stature in education, and because those thinkers who are now more fashionable to study seem to allude to him a lot as well (see Westbrook, 1991 and Johnson, 1995 for good summations of Dewey’s reception by educators since the time of his death).
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