This book presents a range of teaching strategies developed by teachers of literature who have heard the call from students, employers, and academic administrators for more relevant learning experiences in an ever-changing world. Integrating critical theory and classroom experience, the contributors to this book demonstrate how they foster learning, collaboration and cooperation, and creative thinking. The book abounds with descriptions of successful non-traditional teaching strategies. We see teachers collaborating across disciplines and across colleges, in some cases across countries and grade levels, and demystifying literary studies for students brought up on visual media. Many of the contributors lead their campuses in the use of computer-mediated communication and multimedia to support instruction. The chapters exemplify the shift from understanding teaching as "making students see what the teacher sees," to inviting them to engage texts together, as a community, and to learn how, with their teacher, knowledge and authority are culturally and socially constructed. In Learning Literature in an Era of Change practicing teachers offer their peers in literature and composition, and faculty developers, an exciting range of new models where professors are partners in learning, and where education is not delivered but discovered and disseminated.

Proposing a conceptual framework for evaluating "hand-held" books, Dresang (information studies, Florida State U.) explains how books are changing along with developments in digital information and how librarians, teachers, and parents can recognize and use books to create connections for and among young people using digital concepts and designs that emphasize multilayered, nonlinear stories and information. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Offering the wisdom that only experience and expertise in the field can bring, this book takes a critical look into the present and the future of literacy as envisioned by leading reading researchers. The lead author of each chapter, and in some cases more than one, of the authors, is a distinguished reading researcher elected by their peers into the Reading Hall of Fame. In this book these distinguished literacy leaders extend their role as researchers to speak directly to issues of practice and policy. All chapters address the theme of literacy and the teaching of literacy as being in a constant state of change. The authors are theoretical as they describe literacy, literacy acquisition, and the teaching of literacy; they are practical as they examine the issues that classroom teachers and reading specialists engage with on a daily basis; and they are political as they advocate for informed policy at the local, state and national levels. A key message in this book is that literacy professionals must take an active role to shape change.

It has long remained a tacit assumption in hermeneutics and literary theory that works of imaginative literature have the potential to change the reader’s self. Literature and Transformation develops a method called Intimate Reading to investigate how ordinary readers are deeply moved by what they read and the transformative impact such experiences have on their sense of self. The book presents unique narratives of such experiences and suggests a theory of transformative affective patterns that may form the basis of an affective literary theory.

A story of love and grief. ‘I became a widower and a father on the same day’ says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love.

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