When evaluating the effectiveness of their program, members of the Brooklyn College SEEK Department, a higher education opportunity program, decided to make their pedagogy more student-centered. They created a method of reading instruction, which they named critical inquiry. Its goals are to build community through teaching students to annotate,…

Offers five recommendations for teachers or facilitators of team communication: (1) students should avoid groupthink; (2) offer students methods for reaching agreement in a timely manner; (3) vary subjects of group writing assignments; (4) encourage all students to be active participants; and (5) emphasize the importance of good writing skills to…

One composition instructor's purpose is to address, or perhaps, re-dress, the balance of the relationship between teacher and student using a dialogic framework that provides for reciprocity. Her aim is to provoke, to seduce (persuade through passion), and to awaken their incipient sense of wonder at the world and the language that creates this…

Students can be motivated to write and be guided through the writing process without giving them the impression that they are doing it again until they get it right. To motivate students, make it known as specifically as possible what kind of written assignment will be required and how it will be graded. Then guide the students towards the goal by…

Breaking down gender barriers in composition and literature classrooms suggests that teachers rethink the forms of writing they demand of their students (e.g., argumentation and exposition) and that they encourage a wide range of approaches which account for gender-specific modes of writing and interpreting texts. Various writing assignments such…

Describes a first-year college composition course and the daily preparatory writing assignments, "inquiry response papers," that form its core. Describes how these assignments, in which students respond to their homework reading, have led to a collaborative, dialogic classroom where students realize and express their own voices, and have fostered…

A college classroom in a southern U.S. university served as the location for a case study on the effects of gender on communication. Of 31 students in the class, only 8 were men. The majority of class time was devoted to discussion; a typical class consisted of a presentation of terms and theories in a text, and an effort to find "real life"…

Collaboration in writing is not confined to conventional multiple authorship and peer editing, but extends across the text to include its readers. Strong support for language development comes from dialogic situations in which student writing is created as a response to some other utterance, and yet classrooms rarely support such situations. The…