The body biography, a visual and written life-size composition to study characterization, makes use of a variety of materials such as markers, crayons, and found material from wrapping paper to remnants of string and yarn. In this study, three teachers were invited to implement the body biography practice as part of their delivery of the English…

This article describes a teacher's willingness to perform an autobiographical spoken word poem in his classroom, which provided an important model for students as they composed and shared their own slam-style poems.

Learning to read and write starts at a very young age. It is expected that by the time students enter high school, they have developed certain reading and writing skills. However, research has proven many students still struggle with reading and writing skills in high school. Some of these students graduate high school ill-prepared to enter…

After having success with this warm-up activity in his theater classes, the author adapted it for his beginner-level English classes, knowing his students would appreciate the opportunity to move around. The activity allows students to create their own physical interpretation of a vocabulary word, which increases their ability to remember it…

This article explores how policy discourses of creativity have an impact on the way that secondary English teachers construct creativity themselves and the opportunities that they have to enact these constructions in their classrooms. In particular, it focuses on policy around language learning and creativity, identifying significant differences…

Modern secondary courses in English differ from classical tradition in their tendency to avoid direct instruction in the content and style of writing. Such avoidance is partly a function of anxieties about the role of English in students' personal development and a fear of limiting their self expression. Neither of the dominant writing pedagogies…

David E. Kirkland turns our attention to the ways tattoos can represent "human" stories of literacy through the power of inked flesh, the self-portrait it creates, and the words and worlds that surround the body. The body, for Kirkland, is an important site of cultural production that represents the transformative, political, and personal terrains…

This paper describes how adolescent students responded to a poetry workshop in an English classroom where the content was derived from their knowledge from their various life experiences and understanding of world events. Informed by theories of New Literacy Studies, ethnographic methods of participant-observation were used to document an eighth…

Bringing about sensitivity to the composing process entails not only writing itself but the exploration of life around us. (KS)

Edited version of a paper presented in the Education and Creativity Symposium at the congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (Adelaide, South Australia, August 1969). (Editor/SW)

This paper discusses the shift in recent years from a focus on product and method in teaching college composition to a philosophy that values the individual human experience as popularized by Sartrean existentialism. Such a philosophical orientation is viewed as both inappropriate and potentially dangerous because it values the individual as an…

Describes a way to enhance personal growth and meet humanistic goals through writing. (KS)

The sort of self-expression that is central to English teaching should be concerned with the whole self, action and sensation, reflection and speculation, and with ideas as well as with emotions. (HOD)

This discussion gives a rationale for providing options for extrapolation within the context of composition topics. Whether topics are specified by someone other than the writer or are self-chosen, they "fructify" according to the composer's sense of purpose and audience. Developing such a sense has not been a prominent part of the typical school…