In social work practice, writing is a tool for advocacy, communication with clients, and other professionals, and accountability. In virtually all practice settings, workers at every organizational level invest significant time and effort in writing. However, the social work education literature reveals little attention to teaching BSW students to…

Future teachers often manifest a low confidence in their own writing and do not see themselves as writers. Developing an identity as authors requires ample opportunities for writing that sustain preservice teachers' discourses and cultural models. As writing across the content areas is considered a powerful way of learning, creating spaces for…

The model presented in this article aspires to represent a theoretically valid and coherent definition and description of writing, as a basis for teaching and assessing writing as a key competency in school. It represents a critique as well as an extension of previous alternatives in that it views writing as a culturally and individually…

While the editors of "Across the Disciplines" were working at the Michigan State University (MSU) Writing Center in 2011, they began focusing on the issues of graduate writing support through their involvement with the graduate writing groups hosted through the MSU Writing Center, conducting research on the benefits of such groups. When…

When writing teachers at any level get together to assess student essays, they often disagree in their evaluations of the writing at hand. This is no surprise as writing is a complex process, and in evaluating it, teachers go through a complex sequence of thoughts before emerging with an overall assessment. Critical thinking, or the complexity of…

Graduate students face a fundamental change in identity when transitioning from undergraduate writers to graduate writers. In their new role as graduate writers and researchers, they must move from consuming knowledge to producing knowledge through their writing. Often, they must learn new genres of writing, new disciplinary conventions, and new…

The authors consider how portfolios can meet the challenges of assessing various aspects of literacy and student learning. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) specify the knowledge and skills students need for success in college and the workplace--including writing in all content areas. The CCSS attends to range as a core theme in a more…

During what might have in the distant past been called "quiet time" in Arlene Anderson's fourth-grade classroom, many of her students are glued to their netbooks. The intense, enthusiastic focus and the hushed chatter amongst the students are all about high scores and strategy. Students are revising and editing their writing assignments within a…

Widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the United States has resulted in an unprecedented set of national secondary school writing standards that shift responsibility for writing instruction across content areas. As secondary school teachers grapple with these new demands, this article proposes that WAC can serve as a key…

This article shares strategies that educators can use to assist students in meeting the challenges of academic writing more effectively. In order to foreground an understanding of struggling writers, the text begins with a brief review of composition theory and history related to basic writers and identity. It goes on to examine classroom…

"Blogging across the curriculum: Integrating blogging in the elementary classroom" is an Action Research Project that sought to explore the level of engagement in the writing process by students in grades 3, 4 & 5 while blogging across the curriculum. Blogging took place in homeroom classrooms as well as in the school's math, science and…

Ideally, college classes are small. Kilgore and Cook (2007) observed that large class size can be an obstacle to good teaching. However, there is financial and human resource value in delivering quality course content in large lectures. Consequently, large lecture classes are a fundamental part of the undergraduate student experience at many…

A newly-hired faculty member at the State University of New York at Cortland began a Faculty Writing Group that met every other week to discuss their writing projects and progress. What he expected was that the members would sustain themselves as writers via the newly established Faculty Writing Group. What he did not expect was that the Faculty…

"Stonehill Writes" is an example of an in-house Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) journal that records what is being written and how it is being written by administrators, faculty, students, and alumni. Published at Stonehill College, a small liberal arts college with a student body of 1600 and a faculty of 107 full-time teachers, the…

In this article, the author focuses on first grade readers and writers who revisit their work and describes what first-graders do when they revisit their writing about science and literature and review collections of their work. The first-graders discussed here are in Elaine O'Connor's classroom at Clark Elementary School in Charlottesville. In a…