Read a Good Article from NCTE
from NCTE INBOX 6-28-11
As we think about NCTE's Centennial celebration this fall, we have a timely opportunity to revisit some great articles from NCTE journals. Take time this summer to "read the past" from NCTE.
Edwin Hopkins wrote "Can Good Composition Teaching Be Done under Present Conditions?" in 1912. And this author of this article in the first English Journal answered, "No." Hopkins, a former professor of rhetoric and English language at the University of Kansas, was a member of the first Board of Directors of NCTE and coauthor of the first NCTE constitution. NCTE continues to pay tribute to this founder with the English Journal Edwin M. Hopkins Award Edwin M. Hopkins Award.
Louise Rosenblatt is best known for her influential texts Literature as Exploration (1938) and The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978), in which she explained that the act of reading literature involves a transaction between the reader and the text. The article “Retracing Rosenblatt: A Textual Archaeology” from Research in the Teaching of English shows how Rosenblatt's ideas behind this text grew and changed over time. In 1977 Louise Rosenblatt reminisced about NCTE in "What We Have Learned: Reminiscences of the NCTE."
At the end of the 1980s, Peter Smagorinsky wrote the English Journal article "Small Groups: A New Dimension in Learning," in which he stated that when the focus is on students and their own inquiry in small groups, they lessen their reliance on the teacher and improve both their social and their cognitive skills.
Even in 1994 there were wonderings about the place for literature in the classroom given increasing technology, as Tim Gillespie explained in "Why Literature Matters" in English Journal. More recently, Gillespie published "The List" -- a list of 15 reasons to keep teaching, to remind us (and himself) of the "greatest pleasures and highest callings" that we can experience as English teachers. What would be on your list?
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