Recasting the Text, a companion volume to Learning the Landscape, provides activities that help students explore multiple ways of reading and re-creating a text in various forms. Examining the concept and uses of intertextuality among works from diverse times, places, and peoples, students see how individuals re-read and re-see human experience through stories. By creating texts themselves and reading clusters of texts from similar sources, students gain new perspectives about the processes of reading and writing.
Recasting the Text thoroughly integrates the language arts, utilizing ways of knowing to which students respond most keenly: observing, analyzing, imagining, and reflecting. Students will deal with language and literature experiences through a range of media that includes writing, drawing, and performing, as well as discussion. All strategies have been tested in classrooms across the country and are based on current learning-through language theory.
This book can be used alone or as a supplement to any literature and language text. It is especially suitable for grades ten through twelve.
About the Author: Fran Claggett taught high school English and humanities for many years. Former department chair and mentor teacher at Alameda High School, Fran was twice named Teacher of the Year in her district and county, where she initiated an achievement and portfolio writing assessment program. Her teaching experience includes college appointments in English, biology, and physical education; she has also been the James Lynch Lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She has given workshops for teachers across the country, evaluated schools in Guam, and taught in the Bay Area Writing Project Panama and the Virgin Islands summer workshops.
Ruth Vinz is a professor and the Enid and Lester Morse Chair in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Before becoming a teacher educator, she taught in secondary schools for more than twenty years. Vinz is the author of several Boynton/Cook titles, including Learning the Landscape: Inquiry-Based Activities for Comprehending and Composing, Recasting the Text: Inquiry-Based Activities for Comprehending and Composing (both coauthored with Fran Claggett and Louann Reid, 1996), Inside Out: Developmental Strategies for Teaching Writing, Second Edition (coauthored with Dan Kirby and Tom Liner, 1988), and Composing a Teaching Life, 1996.
