Building Foundations for Reading Success

Author(s):  
Janet Allen ◽  
Christine Landaker

At a time when districts have mandated coverage of elaborate lists of content standards, most teachers are feeling the challenge of covering so much material with students who come to class lacking the interest, background knowledge or content language necessary for reading historical texts. An additional challenge affects our instructional decisions when we also must work with students who have no sense of the time and place in which they live. Christine’s 8th grade classroom offers us a great example of how difficult it is to teach, or even to know where to begin, when this combination of problems occurs. Christine and her students had just begun a unit on Colonial America, and Christine worked with her students to generate a list of information they would need to find in order to be experts on what life was like in one of the three Colonial regions. After generating their lists, students used three sources to create their descriptions of life in Colonial America: A History of US, the district-adopted textbooks, and related supplemental trade books. Imagine Christine’s surprise when one group of experts reported that colonists traveled by whores and communicated via cell phones! On days like this, we are reminded of how important it is to build background knowledge with students before asking them to read, write, or conduct research. Even our best students struggle to understand concepts that seem far removed from their lives, and our most struggling readers are often so overwhelmed they do not even attempt to read their assignments. As content teachers, we have four broad tasks:… • Assessing the knowledge base students bring to the study • Providing students with experiences that give them a rich and memorable context for their reading • Anticipating words and concepts that may make reading difficult • Helping students develop questions they would like to answer so that they have a purpose for reading… As we were writing this book, Christine reminded me just how important it is simply to ask students what they already know—before beginning teaching. She said she often starts class by writing the following statement on the board: “What do you already know or think you know about ___________?” She then records students’ answers on a chart or transparency.

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dwi Puji Rahayu ◽  
Asep Yudha Wirajaya

This study aims to present a historiographic review of the text of the Yellow Tale in the State of Gagelang (hereinafter abbreviated as HSK). This research uses the historical method. The steps used in this study are (1) heuristics; (2) criticism; and (3) historiography. The results of research on this study are known that (1) In the text HSK tells about Sunan Kuning to his descendants and various conflicts in it; (2) The history of the tumult not only describes the conflict between Java and China, but also indicates the interference of the Dutch colonial involvement in it; (3) The relevance between the HSK text and the history of Pacer commotion. The relevance is illustrated by the existence of relevant and interrelated events between the HSK text and the history of Pacer commotion. During this time, the discourse that continues to be "echoed" by the colonial side is the commotion of Chinatown is a dark history for humanity in the archipelago. In fact, the discourse continues to be reproduced when various riots erupted in the country. The discourse that is raised is always based on ethnicity, religion, race, and intergroup. Thus, the presence of the HSK text is an important witness for the history of humanity on earth in the archipelago. In addition, HSK also uses the background of the banner story. It shows that history is not always written by "winners". Because the banner story is a folklore that is so closely related to the life of the Indonesian people. Therefore, a comprehensive and integral study of HSK and other historical texts is absolutely necessary to be carried out in order to reveal the true historical facts. So, Indonesian people can re-recognize the history of their ancestors, both through colonial sources and from the perspective of the nation's own historiography.


Author(s):  
Lara Freidenfelds

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy is a history of why Americans came to have the unrealistic expectation of perfect pregnancies and to mourn even very early miscarriages. The introduction explains that miscarriage is a common phenomenon and a natural part of healthy women’s childbearing: approximately 20 percent of confirmed pregnancies spontaneously miscarry, mostly in the first months of gestation. Eight topical chapters describe childbearing and pregnancy loss in colonial America; the rise of birth control from the late eighteenth century to the present; changes in parenting from the early nineteenth century to the present that increasingly focused attention on the emotional relationship between parent and child; the twentieth-century rise of prenatal care and maternal education about embryonic growth; the twentieth-century blossoming of a consumer culture that marketed baby items to pregnant women; the abortion debates from the mid-twentieth century to the present; the late twentieth-century introduction of obstetric ultrasound and its evolution into a pregnancy ritual of “meeting the baby” as early as eight weeks’ gestation; and the late twentieth-century introduction of home pregnancy testing and the identification of pregnancy as early as several days before a missed period. The conclusion offers suggestions for how women and their families, health-care providers, and the maternity care industry can better handle pregnancy and address miscarriage.


Author(s):  
Stefan Bauer

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city’s significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how history-writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualizing the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530–68), this book shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of patronage and ideology placed on them. This book sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.


Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 229-243
Author(s):  
Alicja Piechucka

The article focuses on an analysis of Hart Crane’s essay “Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros.” One of Crane’s few art-historical texts, the critical piece in question is first of all a tribute to the American poet’s friend, the Mexican painter David Siqueiros. The author of a portrait of Crane, Siqueiros is a major artist, one of the leading figures that marked the history of Mexican painting in the first half of the twentieth century. While it is interesting to delve into the way Crane approaches painting in general and Siqueiros’ oeuvre in particular, an analysis of the essay with which the present article is concerned is also worthwhile for another reason. Like many examples of art criticism—and literary criticism, for that matter—“Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros” reveals a lot not only about the artist it revolves around, but also about its author, an artist in his own right. In a text written in the last year of his life, Hart Crane therefore voices concerns which have preoccupied him as a poet and which, more importantly, are central to modernist art and literature.


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (31) ◽  
pp. 68-86
Author(s):  
Anna Dashchenko

This article presents the first Russian translation of Postface to a Catalogue on Bronze and Stone Inscriptions (In Chinese: 金石录后序) with detailed comments. This postface was written in about 1135 by the outstanding Chinese poetess and the founder of Yi-an style Li Qingzhao (1084–1155). Her work is not just a supplement written to a fundamental catalogue compiled by her husband Zhao Mingcheng – a famous epigraphist, collector of ancient objects of art and high-rank official. Postface is a unique work because it introduces two genres: an epitaph in commemoration of her husband and an autobiographical essay. Moreover, it is the first female autobiography in the history of Chinese literature. The number of hieroglyphs in this text varies from 1866 to 1877 in different editions. We have revealed the distinctive features in Chinese and English traditions of commenting and studying the Postface. Chinese works are characterized by dominance of impressionist evaluations, lack of well-defined analytical categories and background knowledge. In addition, English works are characterized by using different approaches to translation of the dates and the reign periods, and by attention to the certain stories and personalities mentioned in the text for better understanding the biography of Li Qingzhao. Different opinions as to when this Postface was written have been analyzed and we have also presented our point of view to this matter.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Czesław Łapicz

The paper contains a synthetic discussion of original and little known philological manuscripts which had been created since the 16th century by Tatars – Muslims of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – as characteristic Slavic aljamiado. The preserved manuscripts in which Slavic languages – Polish and Belarusian – were recorded in the Arabic alphabet are enormously important for the history of both languages and the Slavic-Oriental language relations. Various types of these historical texts (kitabs, chamails, tajweeds, etc.) contain the first, that is the oldest (16th century), translation of the Quran into a Slavic language (Polish) recorded in the Arabic alphabet (so-called tafsir). These sources are studied within the framework of an original philological sub-discipline of Kitab Studies whose origin and development should be credited to Professor Anton Antonovich from Vilnius University. The author of the paper discusses the research methodology pertaining to these sources, particularly the transliteration of Slavic texts recorded in the Arabic alphabet into the Latin alphabet, and introduces prospective major research tasks for Kitab Studies.


Author(s):  
Joseph Lawson

This chapter considers the history of alcohol in Nuosu Yi society in relation to the formal codification of a Yi heritage of alcohol-related culture, and the question of alcohol in Yi health. The relationship of newly invented tradition to older practice and thought is often obscure in studies that lack historical perspective. Examining the historical narratives associated with the exposition of a Yi heritage of alcohol, this study reveals that those narratives are woven from a tapestry of threads with histories of their own, and they therefore shape present-day heritage work. After a brief overview of ideas about alcohol in contemporary discourses on Yi heritage, the chapter then analyses historical texts to argue that many of these ideas are remarkably similar to ones that emerged in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century contact between Yi and Han communities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-402
Author(s):  
Terence O’Reilly

The recovery of important historical texts in the last half century has provoked a reevaluation of the features of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises that have been described as “mystical” (especially their contemplative dimension and their implicit pneumatology), inviting us to reconsider the history of their composition and first reception, including the relationship between the spirituality of Ignatius to which they give expression, and the teachings of the illuminists or alumbrados. This article furthers this discussion by examining criticisms directed against the Spiritual Exercises during the last decade of Ignatius’s life by two Spanish Dominicans, Melchor Cano and Tomás de Pedroche, who found parallels between the Exercises and the theology of the illuminists. These criticisms were serious enough to affect the received interpretation of what we now call the mystical aspects of the Exercises leading up to its codification in the Official Directory of 1599, particularly regarding the place, if any, of contemplation in the lives of the laity, the role of consolation in prayer, and the experience of direct divine guidance.


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