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Learning To Live: Values And Experience In The Life Of A Classroom, Mary Comstock

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the question, "How are the values of the people who comprise a classroom manifested there?" The results of this ethnographic study are reported in descriptive narrative and cover events which took place in a grade five classroom over a period of four and a half months.

The body of the narrative entails events in an experiential learning environment in which the teaching of content area curriculum was accompanied by numerous field trips and other hands-on activities. Moreover, lessons intended to raise the children's awareness of environment, community, ethics and values were also taught.

This study concludes that …

Playful Literacy: First-Graders As Meaning-Makers In The Literacies Of Play, The Creative Arts, And The Language Arts, Judith Macdonald Fueyo

Doctoral Dissertations

This ethnographic study of a first grade classroom examines the interdependence and synergism of multiple symbol systems. Children's oral language, their idiosyncratic use of time and space in the classroom, as well as their play and artmaking all suggest dynamic interrelationships with their writing. Simply put, the study asks, How do play, work in the creative arts, and the language arts influence each other?

Historically, language arts studies have been verbocentric. Such an exclusively verbal conception of language arts limits expressive potential in general, and in particular, limits writing development. Nearly a decade ago, Janet Emig asked writing researchers, "...for …

A Study Of Children's Reading/Writing Relationships In A Grade Five Classroom, Mary-Ellen Macmillan

Doctoral Dissertations

This research is based on an ethnographic study of how children in grade five choose to relate reading and writing. The two-year study, which took place in Mary Ann Wessells' grade five classroom in Stratham Memorial School, investigated how changing the classroom environment enabled the children to engage in the processes of reading and writing and make connections between learning in both areas. The data were collected through participant-observation in the room with fieldnotes, interviews with the children, and the children's writing, writing folders, reading folders and journals as primary data sources. The results of the study describe: (1) the …

British Romanticism And Composition Theory: The Traditions And Value Of Romantic Rhetoric, Sherrie L. Gradin

Doctoral Dissertations

My study examines, through the philosophies and writings of the British Romantic poets, particularly those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, their beliefs about education, their theories on composing, and their interaction with the political and social climate as they relate to current expressivist rhetorical theories and pedagogies. I explore the ways in which Romantic assumptions surface in subsequent philosophers, educators, and rhetoricians such as Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey, and more recently, Ann Berthoff, Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow. I argue that like the Romantics, current expressivists are interested in cultivating an imaginative intellect in their writing students. …

Breaking The Rules: Teaching And Learning Writing In The High School, Ann Bruthwell Vibert

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the development of student- and process-centered writing classrooms within the context of a traditionally structured, curriculum-centered high school. The focus of the study is on how teachers and students experience and address contradictions between assumptions implicit in writing process pedagogy and assumptions implicit in the structure and organization of the high school.

An eight-month ethnography of two high school English classrooms, the study is a descriptive narrative of the classroom and school events punctuated by the reflective comments of teachers and students in intensive and extensive interviews. The classrooms are "placed" within the school, the teachers within …