"The Fourth "R"," an article about the use of memory and writing to heal, describes the way Maryann Pasda DiEdwardo and her sister Patti Pasda, wrote their new book called The Passing Light, Transforming Poverty Through Becoming Poor and Serving the Poor. Both the article and the novel are pieces of writing that add new life to 21st century thought, cancer therapy, and education. Memory heals our voices as we grow spiritually and write to share truths.

In The Passing Light we tell our stories about tragedy and deep pain. We explain how we battle child abuse, cancer, lupus, through understanding of historical memoir as a tool for healing. We use memories of our own past hurts, research about other human tragedy that seems to speak to us as a remembrance. Understaning other types of testimonials seems to bring us to a sense of clarity about our own tragic experiences.

So we write fiction to explore realities of our real lives. The horrid idea of famine set in the time of the tragic potato famine in Ireland and the struggles of Irish immigrants and other immigrants as well in the centuries of turmoil, 19th, 20th, and the uncertain future and economic strife of the 21st century. History provides a backdrop to our own discoveries that we heal through sharing our stories of abusive childhoods that lead to illness and suffering. We find stable health through service, research, writing, sharing, recognition and forgiveness.

Our message to our readers is that transforming yourself through becoming poor and serving the poor changes your daily goals so your mind can reveal your own health and healing to remain paramount to daily life routine. When Patti learned that she had cancer, we both decided to change our lives. Patti closed her businesses and became poor as if to live the life of poverty with small meals, food bank help, and reliance on friends and family. I changes my ow life to serve the por in a local soup kitchen and decided to serve others every day as a spouse, mother, friend, sister, and community member. I make my clothing and knit for my community as a fre service. I only use money for service to others. We learned to live with less, learned to tell others of our writing endeavors that heal us through volunteering at a soup kitchen, care of one's health via a simple life concentrating on food shelter and clothing, service of others in our community as a way of life. We now live peaceful days. We recall, remember the pain, write about the experience, research the pain of others, and learn courage based upon oral histories!

We tell our own histories and write fiction to reveal new writing techques that combine creative non-fiction and fiction as writing is a new way to heal. Our new book is about freeing oneself from the constrains of an abusive childhood and results of chemotherapy to develop neurons and heal through writing about history.

Transform yourself and become poor to serve the poor by reading our fiction work that also contains memoir and self help technqiues. Set in a framed historical fictional universe, depicting a small town in Pennsylvania in the early building stages of young America, designed as historical fiction and inspirational tale, the novel The Passing Light tells the story of Jonathan, an Irish Immigrant, and his sister Joan, with their struggles and joys as they try to survive and find a way of life and people to love. Both meet wonderful companions, learn to love again after brutal childhoods and marry. Themes of poverty and abuse, tragic famines, early deaths, and a lack of dignity for all of life surround the main characters as they try to form and find ways to be American. With a 21st century storyteller who relates the tales from a diary, the authors create a novel that bears the pain and truth of three centuries to reach out to readers about the need for social justice and healing through service and the strength gained by extraordinary virtues of faith and hope through the love of humans and animal companions.

With co-author Patricia Pasda, Pennsylvania Voices Books are a series of historical memoirs. Writing has brought me to the realization that learning is based on the keen use of memory that we teach our students. I have written passages that inspire me to continue to write based on my own study of how memory can charged the mind to create writing. "All writers, whether they are youngsters the age of two, or the elderly, have vital voices in their selected language....writing, an art, is a necessary endeavor, natural for the growth of human intelligence." (DiEdwardo, The Horse Keeper)

The Fourth R is the result of four years of intensive personal scholarship as a teacher and a promoter of writing as a tool for learning to think based on the topic of memory and testimonials found in Hispanic American Literature as a paradigm for learning. The fourth R based upon history as essential to learning engages students. Fourth R and Fourth R Curriculum Models present educators with studies in literature based on history as the voice of culture ringing the songs of change. Let us examine an educational framework for all cultures and expand from what exists on the page within three Rs to what can exist with imagination and fortitude to testimonial based on historical memoir or fourth “R”.

Rooted in educational theory based upon Hispanic American Literary Traditions, historical memoir writing creates students' voices. On February 18, 2004 - April 25, 2004 at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Our Journeys / Our Stories: Portraits of Latino Achievement explored the diversity of the Latino experience in the United States through stories and portraits of men and women who have led extraordinary lives. Another example of the fourth r is the Stanford University Press Latin American Studies Book Award 2005 is The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata. Winner of the 2005 Book Prize, sponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Section, Southern Historical Association. Barbara Ganson is the author. This ethnographic study is a revisionist view of the most significant and widely known mission system in Latin America—that of the Jesuit missions to the Guaraní Indians, who inhabited the border regions of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. It traces in detail the process of Indian adaptation to Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.
Clearly, Hispanic American Literature explores emerging cultural issues that impact major literary collections with poetry, drama, fiction and creative non-fiction about personal rights, dignity and freedom paramount to the establishment of the human condition through literary topics applicable in technology, enhanced and distance as well as traditional classrooms. The genre offers the literary scholar the opportunity to forge a new genre filled with a plethora of emotionally charged ideas. My pedagogy is based upon current teaching practices with focus on journaling through technology, writing process within technology classrooms, electronic portfolios, group projects through technology with wiki, blogs, discussions and chats as primary tools for learning how to write through concepts ignited through Hispanic American Literary Genre. Reader Response Theory, New Historicism, Deconstruction and Writing Process combine to produce an educational setting that provides the writing students with spaces to plan, revise, edit, polish essays, and learn to produce creative non-fiction projects. Currently, I introduce my new book The Horse Keeper, The Healing Gifts of Painting and Writing about Horses as part of my presentation as a hands on segment of the fourth "r" theory I created. My participants learn that travel writing, author impersonation, service writing and personal memoir which are themes. Therefore, I teach dual tongue and multilinguistically. The thought process should be respected and cherished as paramount feature of the human mind. All learning and healing starts with the dignity of the mind and the langue most understandable. Writing, an art, is a necessary endeavor natural for the growth of human intelligence.
“Journey” (2004 Selling, page 97-98) through time to develop language skills. As cultures converge in global 21st century classroom, students of multiethnic backgrounds require varied models to succeed. Reading, writing, and arithmetic which served our industrial society may be enhanced by a new fourth “R” or remembrance as educational focus for the age of technology and multiculturalism. Language is the basis of classrooms whether traditional, enhanced or distance. In fact, Howard Gardner, in Frames of Mind (1983 page 78), regards the “rhetorical aspects of language as the ability to use language to convince other individuals of a course of action; the mnemonic potential of language to help one remember information; the role of language in explanation and the potential of language to explain and reflect on itself as in metalinguistic analysis.” Language based upon oral history ( Selling 2004, page 81) can connect cultures in classrooms.
Clearly, the fourth “R’ based upon language as essential to learning functions of language and engage students. Definition of the Fourth “R” and Fourth “R’ Curriculum Models present educators with studies in literature as the voice of culture ringing the songs of change. Latin American Literature is such a genre. Let us examine an educational framework for all cultures and expand from what exists on the page within three R’s to what can exist with imagination and fortitude to testimonial or fourth “R”. Teach courage based upon oral histories as noted by scholar Bernard Selling (2004 Selling).
Definition of the Fourth “R”
The fourth “R” contains multicultural focus on Latin American and Latino Studies with an emphasis on testimonials and opportunity to forge a new genre filled with a plethora of emotionally charged ideas. Statistical results of research have suggested that the themes connected to the new emerging genre are grounded in theory that language promotes learning in multicultural settings. Cultural understanding of individual learning methods precipitates the fourth “R” paradigm to present history through language form as framework. Rooted in educational theory based upon Hispanic literary traditions of transformative voices through oral and written personal histories imagined through paradigms such as family and faith, my original framework echoes student memory. Once engaged, memory initiates writing process. In enhanced, traditional or distance K-post graduate classroom, historical memoir writing creates students’ voices.