InLand/YA Booktalks

Call for Manuscripts: Environmental Issues in the Language Arts Classroom

You are invited to submit manuscripts to the award-winning Oregon English Journal for its Spring 2008 issue on

"Environmental Issues in the Language Arts Classroom."

Submission deadline: February 1, 2008

Long before the first Arbor Day celebration in 1872 and the world's first Earth Day in 1970, educators and students alike have pondered, studied, classified, debated, and been confounded and inspired by the natural world.

Headlines report wildfires, shrinking shorelines, super-storms, toxic wastes, permanent loss of plant and insect species, oceanic dead zones, and climate change at breath-taking rates. We can't look away from frightful media images of drowning polar bears, ruined migration routes, extinctions by poaching, the growing scarcity of fresh water and clean air, third world famine, uncontrolled urban sprawl, population growth, and our suicidal dependency on fossil fuels. Environmental issues, once the province of science are now becoming part of our global consciousness and have begun to permeate most aspects of the school curriculum.

Join the Oregon English Journal * in unearthing ways to engage students in an examination of the world around them.  How important is it that students discuss the social, cultural, or political aspects of the environment in the classroom?  What diaries, journals and autobiographies work as catalysts for personal and narrative writings? What materials can we draw from other disciplines—sciences, math, the arts, history—that give students a broader understanding of their place in the world?  Have you worked with teachers from other disciplines on meaningful environmental projects or inquiries?

Are curriculum issues developed or stymied by public pressure to balance preservation of natural areas with progress? Can teachers integrate environmental agencies and local resources into school programs? Consider the literature of exploration, field trip accounts, and even scientific notation of natural observation. What role do teachers play as advocates for environmental education? How have you worked with colleagues to integrate school- or district-wide curriculum? What works of literature show the power and importance of nature in character development, revelation, and fulfillment?   How have you invited your students to incorporate the natural world into the skills you teach them?

What novels or poetry do you use to show the relationship of the environment to daily life?  Ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.  How have literary studies in an age of environmental crisis influenced your teaching and choice of curriculum?  In what ways is the environmental crisis seeping into contemporary literature and pop culture?

OEJ invites manuscripts in varied formats, including articles, debates, position papers, interviews, classroom ideas, program descriptions, reviews, original poetry.

Manuscript deadline:  February 1, 2008.

We suggest submissions of 1500-2000 words. Submit two hard copies (with no author identification on them) double-spaced and titled. Please use a cover sheet for your name, address, email, and a brief biographical sketch (2-3 sentences).

Send to Ulrich H. Hardt, Editor, Oregon English, Portland State University-
GSE, PO Box 751, Portland, Oregon 97207-0751

*Since 1988, 18 issues of the OEJ have been selected by NCTE for national promotionand distribution.

Most Recent InLand: Community and Education

English Record/New York State English Council

Speaking from the Margin: Critical Literacy and Social Justice

With so many troubles in the world, we as teachers need to remember one essential detail* words can have incredible power.  Through literacy, teachers can empower students.  Voices silenced altogether or pushed aside into the margins can be heard whispering.  Let's help those voices become stronger and be heard.  We need to show our students how to help those voices change the world.  Sometimes the voices off to the side of a text are not good voices but the voices of corruption hidden within text and through critical literacy we need to show our students how to critique those mummers between the lines.  How do we as English teachers approach such a monumental task?  How have you shown students the path to empowering marginalized peoples and at the same time call into question the messages from the dominant elite?  In what ways have you used literacy to spark social justice?  Please share your narratives, lessons, and experiences.

Winter 2007: Deadline: 1/10/2008

Expanding Our Horizons: Teaching for Global Understanding

In a recent Time article, How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century, Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe heighten their readers' awareness of the challenges educators face in preparing today's student to meet the realities of living and working in the 21st century.  Who we teach, what we teach, where we teach, why and how we teach all affect and are affected by these realities.  As our schools' demographic profiles continue to change, how do we adjust our practice to address the needs of our students?  Does what we teach reflect an acknowledgement that the canon must expand if it is indeed to include the stories, experiences, and works of a more and more diverse America and an ever-shrinking global village? How do we, as teachers of English Language Arts, create opportunities for students to develop the wide variety of skills needed to examine and address present and future global issues?   As distance learning platforms and internet learning communities such as Blackboard and www.nicenet.org become available to more and more educators and students, how do we use these, and other technological resources, to enhance teaching and learning?  Please share suggestions, experiences, lesson plans, and resources on related subjects.

E-mail [email protected] for manuscript guidelines, etc.

InLand: Call for Copy: There is Tech in TEaCHing!

InLand Needs Your Writing!

Call for Copy: There is TECH in TEaCHing!

In the blink of an eye, students seize the potential uses of emerging technologies– YouTube, MySpace, blogs, wikis, text-messaging, putting them to use in and out of the classroom in ways their creators could not imagine. Overnight, their uses, positive and negative, proliferate. Teachers work hard to keep pace, adapting these technologies to their needs: e-mailing to connect with colleagues, parents, and administration; searching the Web to browse for information and resources for their classes, to check on possible plagiarists, or to consult wikipedia in a pinch. They are allowing (if not encouraging) students to use at least one internet source for research. Some use home pages (some utilizing user-friendly MySpace) or blogs (over 40 schools in PA for example) to disseminate information on their classes to better communicate to both students and parents. Many, too, join listservs to communicate with colleagues near and afar.

Why keep pace? Because these new ways of doing old work are not only more efficient but also more effective than old ways, e.g. telephoning parents or passing our handouts or explaining assignments endlessly to absent students. Teachers are connoisseurs of information; they will find the best way to procure and deliver it.

Some possible article topics include:

- How do you use these technologies in your own ongoing education? How do they facilitate your own learning?

- How do you see students using these technologies productively? Or you could explore the flip-side: How are these technologies being abused by students?

- How do you use technology in your classroom? How do you deal with class management issues? How do you address unequal student access?

- Describe school policies that support or hinder technology use in the classroom. How have teachers coped or overcome these policies?

Send articles to Crag Hill at

1111 E. Fifth St., or by e-mail at[email protected]

InLand is a magazine that serves the interests of approximately 350 K-College Language Arts educators in Idaho and Eastern Washington. Our readers love articles that enlarge their understanding of a topic.

Deadline: December 15, 2007