The bias against personal experience manifests in writing courses as privileging the citation of scholars, fearing emotional writing, and equating argumentation with democratic ideals. To value the lives and knowledges of marginalized students, the curricular goals, assignments, and activities for writing courses needs to be reconsidered.…

Writing instructors and writing tutors are often interested in discovering whether their responses to student writing facilitate student revision at a deep level. This teaching article illustrates how written metaphorical response can prompt student revision beyond surface features. It includes a description of tutor training in metaphorical…

Part of helping students learn to read critically and with comprehension is guiding them to use writing to help think through the content and clarify what they understand--or don't. Looking at students' writing also helps teachers see how much learners are really understanding in their reading and where exactly any learner is struggling. After…

Research in sociolinguistics offers important understandings of the social dynamics impacting how language is acquired, used, perceived, and treated in the U.S. and beyond. It provides opportunities to critically examine societal structures and attitudes surrounding language (including personal beliefs) that create and uphold social and racial…

This article affords insights into the interdependence between writing and critical translation to inform implementations of antiracist and translingual writing pedagogies. Promoting linguistic and social justice for multilingual writers, it presents a writing assignment design that focuses on critical translation across asymmetrical power…

This article describes the author's attempt to convince her students that poetry can be "their thing," and also show them how much it can shape the way they think about the world and their place in it. In this article Melissa Ladenheim describes the technique known as "newspaper blackout" poetry. The exciting thing about this…

Thinking Maps is a language of eight visual patterns, each based on a fundamental thought process, designed by Dr. David N. Hyerle. The visual patterns are based on cognitive skills and applied in all content areas. Not only are they used in different combinations for depth and complexity, but are also used by all members in the school community.…

The Family Backpack Project provided 249 low-income, prekindergarten children and their families with opportunities to read and listen to audio recordings of 3 sets of books in their homes. Families received English or dual-language texts (English plus Spanish, Arabic, Kurdish, or Somali) matched to their home languages. Children and their…

This article shows how students confront offensive language head-on by researching its history and reconsidering its use in contemporary conversation. It describes an assignment in which students study the histories and social reception of words (in some cases considered obscenities) used to insult people of various social categories. Students…

This article presents the case for using a critical literacy approach to enhance the freshman composition experience for second language writers. As our classrooms become more multilingual and multicultural with each passing semester, we need to move away from thinking of our ESL students as "outliers" and consider them as key…

This article centers the stories of two eighth grade students in the context of a social action literacy project. Their teacher designed curriculum that scaffolded opportunities for them to address English language arts standards while speaking out for social change. The students' responses to the project reveal their civic literacy practices, as…

Describes an approach that can be used in a business communication course to help students identify some of the complex issues affecting in-house writing. Presents student responses to a writing assignment involving writing non-routine requests (bad news memos) to subordinates. (SG)

Presents diary excerpts that emerged from two separate teaching experiences with fifth and second graders. Reflects on the author's efforts to communicate the wonder of language and imagination to students. Concludes that by taking account of his own lessons as well as the students' responses to the exercises, the author discovered in a new light…

Grounded in integrated and excerpt style (Emerson, et al., 1995), this article chronicles Mr. Lehrer, an English teacher who provides his students access to standard and nonstandard writing conventions. Student writing samples and discursive practices illustrate enhanced awareness of distinctions between nonstandard language (African American…

The principle of empathic learning (involving activities that help students feel what it is to be like someone else) can be used to teach poetry, a material about which students have strong prejudices, and an activity they cannot imagine themselves ever doing or being interested in. First, students are presented with the conception that people…