Nonfiction+print+texts

//Theatre//
Cooper, Chris. "Theatre in Education: A Struggle Well Worth Having: The Uses of Theatre in Education (TIE) for Learning." //Support for Learning//. 9.2 (2004): 81-87. Print.

Cooper conveys the importance of attending to the "preconditions of learning" and the need for bringing creativity into the process of learning (81). He accounts a drama project which uses theatre and drama to create learning situations that allow young people to explore and explain to themselves the diversity and complexity of humankind, centered upon their need for justice, and to ask questions, find answers and draw into themselves the richness of human culture (82). This article stresses the use of imagination to bring creativity into the process of learning and to focus on how human beings learn, allowing students to explore what life is for and encouraging them to see the world in different ways, giving them ownership over their own learning (87).

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Fleckenstein, Kristie S. "Inviting Imagery into our Classrooms." Language and Image in the Reading-Writing Classroom: Teaching Vision. Ed. Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Linda T. Calendrillo and Demetrice A. Worley. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc, Inc., 2002. 3-26. Print.======

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In the past, traditional pedagogy surrounded the use of linguistic models. Kristie Fleckenstein states that this is due to the nature of teaching in a society that focuses on standardized testing. Furthermore, how well a student does on a standardized test determines the student’s intelligence, negating multimodal forms of intelligence that spread further than simple linguistic capabilities. Fleckenstein explores how imagery is used and how we understand and define our world through imagery. By bringing the teaching of imagery into the classroom, we are tapping into our students inherent use of their senses to explain, explore, and define their world through literature and writing, thus reaching more students who have different modalities of learning. By using imagery as a basic learning block, we add to the strength of the students by scaffolding in a layer of learning that will improve the learning of imagery as well as linguistics in our classroom.======

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Language and Image in the Reading-Writing Classroom: Teaching Vision======

Hobson, Eric H. "Teaching the Language I/My Students See." Language and Image in the Reading-Writing Classroom: Teaching Vision. Ed. Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Linda T. Calendrillo and Demetrice A. Worley. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc, Inc., 2002. 105-118. Print.

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In most classrooms, educators tend to focus on either visual or verbal learning, but seldom are the two used concurrently. Eric Hobson argues that all students have a learning style that combines both visual and verbal modalities of learning. Therefore, he argues that visual and verbal learning should never be separated during the learning process. Hobson spent time working with visual learners in a writing workshop. By using visuals such as imagery with these reluctant writers, Hobson noticed an increase in writing ability. Images that students understood were used to help build confidence throughout the writing process. Students would draw words into images, create charts, and use methods like storyboarding to visually stimulate their ability to write. Teachers are generally verbal learners in nature and as such tend to rely on verbal methods to teach all students. Literatures compound the verbal issue by relying on written texts as the central method of teaching, even though the current generation of learners prefer visual and hands-on activities as a mode of learning. Hobson says that if teachers appeal to the visual sense of the students, teachers will tap into the visual learner’s strengths, who may have all odds against them in a traditional writing/composition course.======

//Dreams//
[|"Why Do We Dream?"] is a short article by Tufts professor Ernest Hartmann published on [|scientificamerican.com]. In the article, Hartmann asserts that one function of dreaming is to help us cope with future traumatic events. His idea is that the troubling emotions of a disturbing experience will be reproduced in less intense forms in our dreams, effectively diminishing the impact such emotions have on our psyches. Consequently, when we encounter similar traumatic events in the future, our brains will be better suited to deal with them. This function of dreams as a primitive psychic coping mechanism provides a perspective different from the Freudian wish-fulfillment.

[|"Dreams Make You Smarter"] is another short article from National Geographic that reports the findings of a study suggesting REM sleep might support creativity and the application of critical thinking. The article also notes how dreams may also assist in how we plan for/think about the future because they are a way of reconstituting memories, a potential function that is apposite to Romeo's sense of dreams portending trouble.

Though I imagine pop-psychology is rampant on the site, [|dreammoods.com] offers simple explanations/interpretations of [|common dreams] that could spark student discussion about the value of analyzing dreams in the first place. Students could read about chasing or falling dreams and evaluate the credibility of the work on the site by comparing the explanations to their own experiences. They could then use their own reaction to explore whether they believe Mercutio's cynicism or feel he's masking his own superstitious belief in attributing meaning to dreams.