This article explores the ways three young students expressed their perceptions about literacy and investigates how their classroom identity shapes and is shaped by those perceptions. The ways in which positioning within a writing event and the classroom culture contributed to the development of writing voice and identity are examined. In…

Suggests several teaching techniques which encourage creative independent writing by providing needed structure. (DD)

Describes a technique for using book reports as a way to encourage self-expression by students. (DD)

A focus was made on puzzling children with the help of few examples, the times when they said unexpected or surprising things or made remarks that shouldn't have been made. The way these children present their meaning in different cases and the resources they draw upon for thinking and for expression is explored.

Describes the author's self-fulfilling experiences in a storytelling workshop, and how she strives to give students the same discovery through stories. (HTH)

A British educator discusses the role of self-expressive talk in the learning process and the influence of teacher attitudes on learning through language. (HTH)

Describes the choral method of poetry used in one grade school to nurture children's poetic self-expression, both soft and violent. Demonstrates through the resulting poetry how culture affects the creativity of even primary grade students. (HTH)

In this article, the author talks about her teaching approach which is from a transactional/ constructivist perspective, embracing both the work of Dewey and Vygotsky. She believes that learning is imbedded in social interaction as part of a sociocultural process that begins at birth. Learning does not occur in isolation, but within a network of…

Children are inspired to write creatively if they are free to sensorially absorb and naturally react to the world around them. (JH)

Interviews Therese Craig, a drama educator at the University of Alberta, Canada, who discusses the nature and rationale of journal writing, as well as applications for its use in the classroom. (HTH)

Argues that the purpose of school--of language and the language arts--is to empower children as public individuals, to give them tools to express their own visions of the world in the public arena. (RAE)

Team writing and shared ideas are interpersonal experiences that motivate children to write. (JH)