THE ARTS OF LANGUAGE: Needed Curricula and Curriculum Development For Institutes in The English Language Arts: Language, Literature, Composition, Speech and Reading

Authors

Paul A. Olson, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

1966

Citation

Report of the University of Nebraska USOE Conference, February 26, 1966, to March 1, 1966. Contract Number OEC-3-6-061764-0568, Nebraska Curriculum Development Center

Abstract

Contents

Participants of the Conference

Representatives of the Professional Organizations as Observers at the Conference

Introduction: The Drift of the Conference, Paul A. Olson

Reading in the Elementary Language Arts Institutes, William Iverson

Report of the Reading Committee, Robert Ruddell, Chairman

Recommendation for Components of the Elementary English

Language Arts Institutes, Robert Allen

Report of the Language Committee, G. Thomas Fairclough, Chairman

Speech in the Language Arts Institute, Kenneth Brown

Report of the Speech Committee, William Buys, Chairman

Composition, Dorothy Saunders

Report on the Composition Committee, Albert Kitzhaber, Chairman

Teachers, Children, and Criticism, Bruce Mickleburgh

Report of the Literature Committee, Stanley Felver, Chairman.

A Proposal for Institutes on Pre-School-Elementary English

Language Arts for the Culturally Deprived, Jack Kittell, Chairman

The Arts of Language, Owen Thomas

On February 26-March 1, 1966, the group listed in the roster met for about three days--and worked over questions as to how America's teachers of grades 1- 6 might be trained (or better, retrained) as scholars and teachers of the English language and its resources.

The purpose of the project was to produce a description of needed research in the area of the in-service retraining of elementary- school teachers in the allied areas of language, literature, composition, speech and reading. The project is needed because: (1) The curriculum is undergoing a rapid change in these areas; (2) The NDEA institutes or other in-service training agencies have not come up with enough adequate proposals for retraining institutes or a sufficient number of adequate curricula to accomplish the in- service job implied by new curricula; (3) Research clearly needs to be done as to how adequate in- service curricula can be created in the area and as to how a sufficient number of adequate retraining programs can be created.

What the conference said, I think, is simple and obvious. It said that we are not, in working out the training of teachers, simply dealing with a retraining job. We are dealing with a reshuffling job; it said that we cannot assume that educators can work at retraining apart from working in clinical schools where children are educated, that scholars cannot exist apart from the schools. It said that the language curriculum can no longer be fragmented at its center. It said that the study of language as it hits the child- -its structure, its learning, and the picture of the world rendered by its imaginative or logical models--is the center of our business, that this is one business; finally, the conference said that all of what we do must ask that scholars, teachers, and children form a single intellectual community working at discovering what the structure of the dialect of the tribe is.