Thinking and Literacy: The Mind at Work

This volume explores higher level, critical, and creative thinking, as well as reflective decision making and problem solving -- what teachers should emphasize when teaching literacy across the curriculum. Focusing on how to encourage learners to become independent thinking, learning, and communicating participants in home, school, and community environments, this book is concerned with integrated learning in a curriculum of inclusion. It emphasizes how to provide a curriculum for students where they are socially interactive, personally reflective, and academically informed.

Contributors are authorities on such topics as cognition and learning, classroom climates, knowledge bases of the curriculum, the use of technology, strategic reading and learning, imagery and analogy as a source of creative thinking, the nature of motivation, the affective domain in learning, cognitive apprenticeships, conceptual development across the disciplines, thinking through the use of literature, the impact of the media on thinking, the nature of the new classroom, developing the ability to read words, the bilingual, multicultural learner, crosscultural literacy, and reaching the special learner.

The applications of higher level thought to classroom contexts and materials are provided, so that experienced teacher educators, and psychologists are able to implement some of the abstractions that are frequently dealt with in texts on cognition. Theoretical constructs are grounded in educational experience, giving the volume a practical dimension. Finally, appropriate concerns regarding the new media, hypertext, bilingualism, and multiculturalism as they reflect variation in cognitive experience within the contexts of learning are presented.