By Marie LeJeune and Tracy Smiles, Western Oregon University
This week, we continue our exploration of authors as mentors—authors whose work and words contribute to our teaching of reading, writing, language, and culture. As we’ve mentioned in past weeks, we are interested in exploring a study of mentor authors whose work informs students as readers and writers but also as global citizens. We are now layering Marie’s framework for Mentor Author Studies with a framework for International Curriculum (Short, 2003).
This week we examine a mentor author study of Sherman Alexie, whose work we have shared with middle and high school students and their teachers. Although Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is his only novel deemed “young adult,” much of Alexie’s work is suitable for secondary study, including many of his poems, essays, short stories and novels. Continue reading
This week, we begin our exploration of some of our favorite authors whom we have looked to as mentors in our classrooms—authors whose work and words contribute to our teaching of reading, writing, language, and culture. Again, we draw upon the framework below for our initial selection of possible mentor authors when we embark upon such study with students. Additionally, we are currently deeply immersed in work with international issues, themes, and literature with both students and teachers in K-12 classrooms. We are now layering <a href="http://wowlit.org/blog/2011/04/04/reading-as-a-collaborative-act-a-framework-for-exploring-author-studies/#more-15955
Many teachers are very hesitant to use graphic novels in their classroom. Much of the hesitation has to do with a personal lack of familiarity with this specific form of literature. For some, the use of graphic novels in the classroom is foreign and scary, some might not even see it as “literature,” while others are actually beginning to see the great advantage of using them to supplement student learning.
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Immigrant students face significant challenges in balancing their home culture and American culture. In 
Emergent bilinguals make up 8.2% of the total population of all children under the age of 18 in South Carolina. While there are many languages spoken by immigrant children in our schools, Spanish is the most widespread language spoken by 40,000 of all emergent bilinguals (
