There is valuable scholarship on the importance of teaching narratives in the FYC classroom, but none does so through the frame of vulnerability. This paper explores, through an IRB approved case study, how composition teachers can best guide students to write powerful and well-crafted personal narratives to ignite students' own voices, histories,…

A well-written argumentative essay requires a thorough analysis of the topic with sufficient supporting evidence. However, obtaining information on the topic, summarizing the reading materials, and then presenting them in the form of an argumentative essay can be a challenging task, especially for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners.…

This article posits that the comic medium, wedded with traditional essay assignments, may be a powerful tool for social studies teachers, those who prepare social studies teachers at the collegiate level and other teachers and professors who desire to teach about citizenship in an era of "fake news" and alternative facts.

Acknowledging criticisms of the values supported by competitive dance, this article seeks to develop and advocate a pedagogical reframing of the event in terms of situated learning and mediated learning experience. Making sense of the competitive experience with the contributions of 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) cognition theory,…

This report sets out the findings of the technical development work completed as part of the Use Cases for Generative AI in Education project, commissioned by the Department for Education (DfE) in September 2023. It has been published alongside the User Research Report, which sets out the findings from the ongoing user engagement activity…

Analytical writing poses particularly challenging, yet often overlooked, language demands that need attention in educational research and practice. In this article, I discuss the Core Analytical Language Skills (CALS) construct and its relevance for school reading and writing. CALS refer to the set of learners' school-relevant language resources…

After reflecting on the difference between his study of source extracts at university and how he was using source extracts in the classroom, Jonathan Sellin went in search of a new way to help his pupils to situate sources in context. Finding inspiration in the work of intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, Sellin decided to show his Year 9…

In this paper, we problematise a competence-oriented reflective approach to intercultural education by drawing on four students' reflective essays about their experiential learning experiences on an "Intercultural Competence" (IC) module. Their reflections sometimes evidence much-vaunted IC attributes such as "tolerance" and…

This study aims to examine how Chinese learners develop in their use and misuse of English modal verbs from Grade 7 to 9. Specifically, it examines form-function connections and explores the factors behind learners' development. The main focus is on the modal verbs "can," "could," "will," "would,"…

Intrigued by the wide range of pupils' responses to a sourcebased essay question, Jonathan Sellin decided to investigate why pupils were using sources in such different ways. Probing his own philosophical assumptions about history, and how they have changed over time, prompted Sellin to explore pupils' assumptions about how historians use sources…

Thomas Nunnally equates five-paragraph format essays with square cucumbers found at farmer's markets: they have an established structure but no argument. The real square cucumbers are students who need a formula to write competently. By providing students with a real audience, a teacher can show that he or she takes students' desires -- and…

Recognising the varied challenges presented by an increasingly diverse student body at our UK university (a research-intensive institution with a high proportion of international and widening participation students), an online and blended writing programme was developed. The Academic Writing Skills Programme (AWSP) is a fully online, compulsory…

At the end of a two-year Honors Civilizations sequence based on a Great Books curriculum, students at the University of Maine write a reflective essay that describes their personal and intellectual journey with the texts they have encountered over the previous four semesters. Students can describe a theme or narrative that has emerged in their…

Jim Carroll was concerned that A-level textbooks failed to provide his students with a model of the multi-voicedness that characterises written history. In order to show his students that historians constantly engage in argument as they write, Carroll turned to academic scholarship for models of multi-voiced history. Carroll explains here how he…

This essay considers the difficulty of seeing systems of oppression--a challenging first step of writing for social change. I argue that service-learning faculty and public writing scholars have relied on outdated ways of thinking about racism and oppression, treating social issues as isolated instances of discrimination. Instead, by drawing from…