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Objective: "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" by Anne Fadiman is a critically acclaimed book describing the importance of understanding cultural influence on health care and health outcomes. Although this book has been incorporated into standard curriculum in the university and medical school training settings, consideration of how "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" might change undergraduate student perceptions on health disparities, specifically among students at a minority-serving institution in the USA, has yet to be explored. Method: A qualitative, thematic analysis, using a pre-/post-test study design, assessed undergraduate students' perceptions of topics of health disparities, spirituality and trust in healthcare providers. A total of 43 student responses characterising their perceptions on these topics were used to define themes both before and after a course utilising Fadiman's book as a teaching tool. Results: Changes within the themes present in the post-test data showed that students had a deeper understanding of the need for communication with healthcare providers, as well as the need to build bridges between traditional spirituality and faith with modern medicine, in the context of respecting one's culture, to effectively promote health outcomes in a multicultural society. Conclusion: An undergraduate course with directed lesson plans taken from "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" afforded undergraduate students at a US minority-serving institution with a way to contextualise why and how cultural differences can lead to health disparities.

The field of teacher research is increasingly including self-study as a valid and reliable method with which teachers can study and improve practice. In this self-study, I develop knowledge of myself as a nonfiction reader and use it to inform my instruction. Guided by the work of Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, and Hurwitz (1999), I use metacognitive reading logs to examine how I think when I read and to select reading strategies around which to develop lessons for my third-grade students. In three cycles of action research, I teach the lessons and analyze them through journaling and dialoging with two critical friends. I find that empathizing with a novice experience of reading helps my lesson content become more rigorous and my pedagogy become more authentic and inclusive of my students as co-constructors of knowledge. These findings have implications for my practice, for teacher professional development, and for the field of teacher cognitive psychology.

"How in the world are we supposed to apply the Common Core writing standards to teaching English language learners?" The authors propose a tentative answer to a question that has been troubling educators of late. Educators, they suggest, need to keep in mind three crucial elements: Students should (1) begin by reading more informational text; (2) prepare themselves for writing arguments by analyzing evidence in the texts they read; and (3) use the structure, vocabulary, and style in their writing that best suits their purpose, topic, and audience. The authors show what this looks like with English language learners at three different levels of proficiency. Beginner ELLs learn problem/solution writing by analyzing a clip from a movie; intermediate ELLs learn about evidence and claims through comparing their neighborhood with a wealthy one nearby; and advanced ELLs learn how to write an argument through using graphic organizers and sentence frames.

Although biliteracy plays a vital role in academic achievement, there has been little research on the unique needs of female and male English language learners. Becoming biliterate is a complex process, compounded by other variables such as 1st-language background, class, culture, and gender. Among these variables, gender has been the least examined and reported for English language learners in the United States. This exploratory quantitative study investigates the interplay between gender and biliteracy in a diverse urban school district. The quantitative data demonstrate gender variations across all years and grade levels and on both English and Spanish assessments.

In this article I explore Joan Didion's novel Play It as It Lays (1970) and her family memoir Where I Was From (2003) in order to assess and compare the ways in which she articulates the telling of both fictional character narratives and ostensibly factual historical tales, both taking place in parts of the California with which she is so intimately familiar. In Play It, Maria Wyeth tries to escape her past through the repression, curtailment and editing of her memories. On the winding freeways of Los Angeles, she feels she can remain in the present and blank out painful memories by looking ahead. 'Never look back at all' is the California mantra that she tries to personify (Didion 2003: 199). In Where I, Didion analyses her own culpability in the mythologization of her home state and the failure of her own narrative authority. What can Didion's fiction and non-fiction, both populated and cultivated by unreliable narrators, tell us about the way history is told, myths of origin perpetuated and memory fabricated, and what might this signify about storytelling in California more generally? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to compare the text genres represented in two recent California-adopted basal readers (grades 1 through 6) with the guidelines for informational text types in the 2009 NAEP framework. Phase 1 of data collection involved the use of two measures to determine the presence of each text genre: number of pages and number of selections. The researchers assigned pages and selections to one of four categories: narrative, poetry, play, or nonfiction. The second phase of data collection involved classification of nonfiction selections according to one of four categories: literary nonfiction, or one of three types of informational text: expository, argumentation and persuasive, or procedural and documents. The researchers computed percentages of pages and selections devoted to each genre and each type of nonfiction across grade levels and series. Results overall indicated that 40% of pages/selections in both series were devoted to nonfiction text, and that 50% of nonfiction text selections were expository and 33% were literary nonfiction. The findings indicate that these basal readers expose students to more nonfiction text than in the past, but that the exposure to informational text is still less than recommended by the 2009 NAEP and limited mainly to exposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]