Mushrooms and the Cycle of Life: integrating literature and biology in secondary teacher education

Can two apparently totally different secondary school subjects join forces in an attempt to enrich the learning processes of both? The authors address this question by describing an experimental lesson in which student‐teachers verbalize their preconceptions concerning a natural object (mushrooms) while in the same lesson they do a personal response activity for a poem by Sylvia Plath entitled ‘Mushrooms’. The results indicate that student teachers of different disciplines find this to be a meaningful teaching approach. It proved to be a motivating way to evoke preconceptions about a natural phenomenon by means of a poem and resulted in an enhanced awareness of mushrooms, which culminated in questions on both their growth and reproduction. Moreover, their ‘literary’ interest in the poem and the writer appeared to be stimulated. Possible applications in teaching and teacher training are discussed.     

The United States as a market for international scholarly publications

Fred Kobrak, who has spent much of his career marketing U.S. scholarly books abroad, puts his experience to use in viewing the task of foreign publishers who wish to sell their products in the U.S. market. In so doing, he discusses changes in the environment of scientific publishing and raises the interesting question of how one distinguishes between “domestic” and “foreign” publishers. He suggests that “U.S.” publishers have much to learn from “foreign” competitors, and that competition can benefit publishers, their authors, and their customers. Fred Kobrak is a partner in Adrian Higham Associates, consultants, on the international publishing industry. He recently retired from the presidency of Collier Macmillan International, New York, the international arm of Macmillan Publishing Company. Address for correspondence