Themes explored include: biblical authority, texts ofviolence, tradition, identity and the other, common hope. Contributors include: David Novak, Barbara Rossing, StevenWeitzman, Hindy Naiman, Ralph Klein, Barbara Bowe, LarryEdwards, Sarah Tanzer, Walter Brueggemann, Susan BrooksThistlethwaite, and David Sandmel.

CO-PUBLISHED BY ROUTLEDGE AND THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH Bringing together arts-integrated approaches, literacy learning, and classroom-based research, this book explores ways upper elementary, middle, and high school teachers can engage their students physically, cognitively, and emotionally in deep reading of challenging texts. With a focus on teaching about the Holocaust and Anne Frank’s diary—part of the U.S. middle school literary canon—the authors present the concept of layering literacies as an essential means for conceptualizing how seeing the text, being the text, and feeling the text invite adolescents to learn about difficult and uncomfortable literature and subjects in relation to their contemporary lives. Offering a timely perspective on arts education advocacy, Chisholm and Whitmore demonstrate the vital need to teach through different modalities in order to strengthen students’ connections to literature, their schools, and communities. Accessible strategies are illustrated and resources are recommended for teachers to draw on as they design arts-based instruction for their students’ learning with challenging texts.

Teaching Challenging Texts shows how to increase reading comprehension and enhance student engagement, even with the most challenging texts. Every chapter features ready-to-use, research-based lessons, replete with explicit instructions, handouts, Common Core correlations, and assessments. "Exploring the Future" features fiction by George Orwell, Suzanne Collins, and William Golding; nonfiction by Philip Zimbardo, Stephen Pinker, Abraham Lincoln, Jared Diamond, Dan Ariely, and Ray Kurzweil; images from several films, an old television commercial; and classical and contemporary music. "Understanding the Power of One" features fiction by Victor Hugo and Lori Halse Anderson; nonfiction by Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Edith Hamilton; a young adult book on archaeology, an animated film from Walt Disney, and an episode from Saturday Night Live. An extensive list of free resources and correlations to the Common Core allow teachers to "teach on the cheap." Teaching Difficult Texts brimswith "relevant and robust" lessons for a new generation.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to text forming resources in English, along with practical procedures for analysing English texts and relating them to their contexts of use. It has been designed to complement functional grammars of English, building on the generation of discourse analysis inspired by Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English. The analyses presented were developed within three main theoretical and applied contexts: (i) educational linguistics (especially genre-based literacy programmes) (ii) critical linguistics (as manifested in the development of social semiotics) and (iii) computational linguistics (in dialogue with the various text generation projects based on systemic approaches to grammar and discourse). English Text's major contribution is to outline one way in which a rich semantically oriented functional grammar can be systematically related to a theory of discourse semantics, including deconstruction of contextual issues (i.e. register, genre and ideology). The chapters have been organized with the needs of undergraduate students in theoretical linguistics and postgraduate students in applied linguistics in mind.

This collection contains studies reflecting the contribution of Martin Buss to biblical scholarship, focusing on the forms and genres of biblical literature and on interdisciplinary approaches to biblical interpretation. Contributors to the volume include J.H. Hayes, J. Kuan, A. Siedlecki, B. Green, M. Miller, R. Bailey, S. Melcher, B. Long, N. Walls, C. Newsom, D. Blumenthal, T. Linafelt, T. Beal, E. Ben Zvi, N. Stipe, N. Habel, F. Gorman, Y. Gitay, J. Lapsley, M. Sweeney, E. Gerstenberger, V. Robbins, D. Jobling, R. Weems, C. Mandolfo, and T. Sandoval.

There are many distinct pleasures associated with computer programming. Craftsmanship has its quiet rewards, the satisfaction that comes from building a useful object and making it work. Excitement arrives with the flash of insight that cracks a previously intractable problem. The spiritual quest for elegance can turn the hacker into an artist. There are pleasures in parsimony, in squeezing the last drop of performance out of clever algorithms and tight coding. The games, puzzles, and challenges of problems from international programming competitions are a great way to experience these pleasures while improving your algorithmic and coding skills. This book contains over 100 problems that have appeared in previous programming contests, along with discussions of the theory and ideas necessary to attack them. Instant online grading for all of these problems is available from two WWW robot judging sites. Combining this book with a judge gives an exciting new way to challenge and improve your programming skills. This book can be used for self-study, for teaching innovative courses in algorithms and programming, and in training for international competition. The problems in this book have been selected from over 1,000 programming problems at the Universidad de Valladolid online judge. The judge has ruled on well over one million submissions from 27,000 registered users around the world to date. We have taken only the best of the best, the most fun, exciting, and interesting problems available.

Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century, Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Known as the Kunta scholars, Mukhtār al-Kuntī and Muḥammad al-Kuntī were influential teachers who developed a pedagogical network of students across the Sahara. In exploring their understanding of “the realm of the unseen”—a vast, invisible world that is both surrounded and interpenetrated by the visible world—Ariela Marcus-Sells reveals how these theologians developed a set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world and that allowed practitioners to manipulate the visible and invisible realms. They called these practices “the sciences of the unseen.” While they acknowledged that some Muslims—particularly self-identified “white” Muslim elites—might consider these practices to be “sorcery,” the Kunta scholars argued that these were legitimate Islamic practices. Marcus-Sells situates their ideas and beliefs within the historical and cultural context of the Sahara Desert, surveying the cosmology and metaphysics of the realm of the unseen and the history of magical discourses within the Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds. Erudite and innovative, this volume connects the Islamic sciences of the unseen with the reception of Hellenistic discourses of magic and proposes a new methodology for reading written devotional aids in historical context. It will be welcomed by scholars of magic and specialists in Africana religious studies, Islamic occultism, and Islamic manuscript culture.

Includes various reports of the Association.

Teach second grade students close reading strategies that strengthen their fluency and comprehension skills! Students will read and analyze various types of texts to get the most out of the rich content. Their reading skills will improve as they answer text-dependent questions, compare and contrast texts, and learn to use close reading strategies on their own! The lessons are designed to make close reading strategies accessible, interactive, grade appropriate, and fun. The lesson plans are easy to follow, and offer a practical model built on research-based comprehension and fluency strategies.