This pretest/posttest nonequivalent groups study explored the relationship between classroom-based creative writing instruction and the figurative language abilities of fourth grade students. Figurative language is widespread within the oral and written discourse of K-12 classrooms and is an essential component of higher-level language and…

The paradigm of "Buen Vivir" (Good Living) in education turns on the educational purpose regarding the transformation of the world. This autoethnography, which draws from "transnationalism theory" (Vertovec, 2009) and "transnational academic mobility" (Kim, 2010), explores how my critical self-examination of…

Chronic illness diagnoses frequently cause the shattering of personal assumptions about the self and the world, resulting in an experience of alienation and fragmentation of identity. Multiple studies on the effects of expressive writing have demonstrated physical, emotional, and psychological health benefits, yet little is known about how it…

Background: Research argues that parents/teachers and learners work collaboratively and this active participation in scaffolded activities builds knowledge and extends understandings. However, researchers who have explored scaffolding as a pedagogic tool do not demonstrate how this tool looks in practice. Objectives: As a teacher educator, I…

Richards (2015) states that receptive competence is far more developed in all language users than productive competence and that in L2 learning, new lexis first shows as passive knowledge and later as active or productive competence. Moreover, productive competence is not a natural corollary to receptive competence; rather, the former requires…

This paper argues that compression is a hallmark of creativity, demonstrating the effect of the process of compression and decompression on the cultivation of creative potentials. This study also suggests some cognitive strategies by which creative literary compression can be encoded and decoded in the light of some relevant theories. In order to…

Complex global challenges and declining scientific literacy demand novel approaches to engaging students with science and the natural world. While evidence supports integrating creative and scientific modes of inquiry, these approaches are often separated in undergraduate education. We designed Ecology Through the Writer's Lens (ETWL) to allow…

Career agency is a vaguely defined concept that is usually explained in terms of cultivating self-reliance, while it is at the same time being critiqued as a difficult to reach goal as a result of societal pressures. Instead of viewing agency through the lens of these opposing viewpoints, focused on people either being self-reliant or determined…

Lesson planning is a core skill teachers need to develop in implementing lessons effectively in the classroom. While metaphor research has been used in a range of contexts including in teacher education, metaphors associated with lesson planning among teachers in developing regions in the world remain underrepresented. Due to the importance of…

Writing creatively, expressively, and reflectively to aid the grieving process is founded on the idea that in order to survive and thrive after loss, personal meaning must be made of what has been suffered. The individualisation and secularisation of society has put the onus of meaning making on the individual while an abiding reservation about…

This article examines the deeper purposes behind the teaching of creative writing. To extend an analogy created by William Blake in his poem 'The Tyger', its furnaces are examined and its 'deadly terrors' clasped. It re-interprets the different views of teaching English, as drawn up in the United Kingdom's Cox Report. It argues that these views…

This paper explores the role of fairy tales in relation to literacy, affective learning, self-authoring and narrative quest. The study examines fairy tales in the context of the New Literacy Studies with regard to improving cognitive, linguistic and creative writing skills for adult literacy learners.

This teaching tip highlights three writing minilessons that help students construct vivid sensory detail (textual detail related to the five senses) in their fiction and creative nonfiction writing. Learning to show, not tell, is a difficult task for novice writers. The author explores reasons why this is the case and provides directions for the…

Drawing upon a postmodern ethnographic approach, the modes of inquiry into this qualitative study included observation and data analysis in order to represent a particular community of students: first year college freshmen from a mid-size, religiously-affiliated university in the southern United States. The methods included artifact…

Research suggests that experts and beginners use qualitatively different writing processes when given the same text to write. Throughout their writing, experts tend to create a network of executive, structural, and content problems that they continually refine and coordinate as they bring the text to fruition. Novices, in contrast, tend to focus…