Over the past 20 years, claims about how and why student writing can serve learning have changed markedly. This has been partly due to new technologies displacing writing as a predominant resource for learning, prompting new sense-making practices and shifts in how these changes are theorized. Learners now routinely collaborate to generate,…

Addressing the concern that writing assignments are used only for recording or relating information, a program called "Writing in Content Areas" has been developed in Minnesota to help students and teachers use writing as a tool for learning. Students are encouraged to use expressive writing for working out ideas, relationships, understandings,…

An argument is put forth for restructuring the community college curriculum around recurring constructs common to all disciplines. First, introductory comments review various perceptions of essential learning, offering support for the position of constructivists and proponents of writing across the curriculum that learning is an activity and a…

Intended for teachers of grades 7-16, this book discusses "heuristic" writing--writing that produces new, irreversible knowledge for the writer leading to a fuller understanding of the self and of the act of writing--as well as principles and practices having direct implications for a wide range of students. Chapter 1 examines the…