Radical Reflections: Passionate Opinions on Teaching, Learning, and Living » (1st ed)

MEM FOX is the author of many acclaimed books, including Possum Magic, Koala Lou, Time for Bed, and, for adults, Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever. She lives in Adelaide, Australia.

The internationally acclaimed children’s book writer and educator offers her insights into the learning process, language education, and the pleasure, growth, and power that reading and writing can bring.

Library Journal

With lighthearted anecdotes, poems, letters, and other writings, the renowned Australian children's book author entices teachers to do more writing themselves and rejects the ``skills-and-drills'' mentality in language arts teaching. Fox, an advocate of the ``whole language'' movement, fiercely condemns the use of basal readers in reading instruction classes. Their dullness, she maintains, causes students to avoid reading altogether. Fox recommends instead that real books be read and real language used. She advocates stories that bring teacher and student together in a relationship to experience genuine feeling, laughter, and fun. A superb writer, she constructs an excellent case, and surely any child would like to be a member of her reading/writing class. Her ideas are jotted down in a rather disorganized fashion, but her writing is fresh. For most public and academic libraries.-- Arla Lindgren, St. John's Univ., New York