In this article, the author focuses on her experiences with genre analysis. This is not a new idea or assignment. But gearing the analysis specifically toward thinking about purpose significantly narrows the focus of a typical "here's what this genre is and who uses it" essay. Genre analysis asks students to think in-depth about one particular…

Argues that through poetry students can give voices to people whose voices usually do not find their ways into their classrooms or textbooks. Discusses poetry and literature, poetry in history, and personalizing poetry. (RS)

Argues that any curriculum of peace must have at its core the teaching (not preaching) of empathy. Recommends ecphrastic poetry (poetic response to works of art) as a teaching tool for empathy, and discusses how the author uses one particular poem written in response to a World War II photograph to stimulate student writing response and…

Describes a very successful writing assignment the author uses with his high school English students, in which students write about a letter of the alphabet. Notes that this assignment grants freedom for exploration and voice, the raw material for shaping and can be used to teach everything from the writing of poetry to essays for college…

Describes how a teacher uses Stanley Kunitz's poem "The Portrait" to help students write poems full of concrete, sensory images about deeply private experiences. Presents examples of student poems. (RS)

Describes the approach used with high school advanced placement English classes to a nature-writing project based on the work of Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard. (SR)

The purpose of this booklet is to illustrate and compare three important levels of expectation, or standards, that have been set for diploma examination writing in English 33 in Alberta, Canada: "3 Satisfactory,""4 Proficient," and "5 Excellent." The booklet presents exemplar papers that were used to illustrate the…

Describes a writing assignment in which students study and imitate the language of a minority author. Discusses how the assignment helps negotiate conflicts when students resist multicultural literature, as their creative responses mediate between themselves and works they might otherwise find foreign and antagonistic. (SR)

Describes an exploration the author and his seventh-grade students undertook as they wrote essays about objects of personal significance. Describes how they examined a piece of literature (an essay) as a model for their own writing, how they spent some time talking and listening to one another about their personal objects, and how they then wrote…