With the proliferation of easy-to-use generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, students in college composition courses can and do take advantage of such technology to assist with essay writing. While a growing body of research does not see using these tools as a problem in itself, institutional, departmental, and instructor policies about generative…

Background: The history essay, and historical writing, are crucial forms of assessment in History throughout primary and high school education. This article draws from an autoethnography of teachings in a pre-service history teachers' school classroom. This article discusses obstacles students experience in conceptualising and writing the history…

The teaching of writing in secondary English subjects in Australia, as in other countries including England and the United States, has become increasingly formulaic. Pedagogies including direct instruction, modelling, scaffolding, and genre-based approaches involve the implementation of formulas for writing sentences, paragraphs, and entire…

The author, a fifth-grade teacher, describes how she reimagined the literary essay curriculum to amplify student identity, agency, and voice by creating a class podcast. Because of their similar structure and organization, teaching students literary analysis and interpretation through podcast writing offered entry into literary essays. The author…

Research shows that students write better academic essays if the instructor facilitates a process of preparation that allows for purposeful peer discussion. Drawing on screenwriting pedagogy, this article proposes a workshop model that lets students express their essay's structural elements as single sentences, which allows for effective peer and…

Strategy instruction is an effective method for improving the writing skills of students who struggle when writing. It is critical when implementing strategy instruction that assessment of the strategy takes place in addition to assessment of writing. Practitioners should consider strategy assessment to ensure student proper use of strategy. This…

I retired from teaching in August, 2018. In the fall semester of that academic year, I taught a section of Basic Writing (now called "Workshop in Composition"), one of the courses I taught in the fall of 1975, my first year at the University of Pittsburgh. This essay is a documentary account of that course, including writing assignments…

A multi-perspective, exploratory framework applicable to all critical thinking, creative and communication acts, 3D-Briefing synthesizes meticulous enquiry questions with a user-focused, equitable stance toward meaning production. It scaffolds identification, interpretation, evaluation, reflection and action in a user-empowered, three step process…

Although photography has long been acknowledged as an important research method and didactical tool in human geography, we feel the need to redraw attention to this particular form of doing explorative research. Today's society becomes increasingly "ocularcentral", yet this trend seems unparalleled with a rise of photography in academic…

Although there is a great deal of available material on using nontraditional resources for teaching sociology, the pedagogical uses of science fiction have not been examined for 20 years. This essay first asserts the need for an update based on changes in society and in science fiction over the past two decades. The paper then focuses on the uses…

This essay considers the relative merits of critical writing and writing in role as a means of enabling and assessing students' responses to literary texts. Drawing largely on the author's experience of teaching "Frankenstein," it argues that the distinction between critical and creative writing is not as absolute as is sometimes…

It is undeniable that attempts to develop automated feedback systems that support and enhance language learning and assessment have increased in the last few years. The growing demand for using technology in the classroom and the promotions provided by automated- written-feedback program developers and designers, drive many educational…

In this teaching article I discuss the pedagogical implications of a classroom activity in which students work reflectively with instructor feedback that has been provided to their writing. Using the "comments" feature in Google Docs, instructors create a dialogue with students through "feedback conversations," in which…

The development of curriculum requires dialogue with both past and future. As the state of Victoria gears up to revise the current study design for Literature, one of three 'Englishes' students can study at senior levels, numbers of students opting to take the subject have dropped over recent years. With high-stakes exam-based assessment dominant,…

Recent applications of artificial intelligence (AI) have been successful in performing complex tasks in health care, financial markets, manufacturing, and transportation logistics, but the influence of AI applications in the education sphere has been limited. However, that may be changing. In this paper, the author discusses several ways that AI…