In the pursuit of fostering vibrant and inclusive learning environments, this article explores how the practice of community-building can be a contemplative practice. Drawing upon personal experiences and pedagogical insights, Muir navigates the rewards of cultivating authentic connections among students while dismantling hierarchies within the…

Through the teaching of writing, classrooms are potential sites to address personal power, welcome student ideas, and cultivate a culture of writing for many purposes. Writing that is personal invites students to explore and compose what is possible and to make connections between a subject and the self. Such writing requires a reimagining of…

This essay explores the creativity and learning that can take place when students are given the opportunity to go beyond the GCSE set poems and create their own poetry anthologies. I argue that in the process of creating a poetry anthology, students are encouraged to engage on a deeper and more personal level with poetry. I suggest that when…

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.

This article details a classroom-based study designed to provide agency and voice to first and second grade emergent bilinguals as they processed the COVID-19 pandemic. Two California teachers created a narrative writing unit not only to teach specific writing skills, but also to challenge pervasive deficit assumptions that young children…

In this collaboratively written piece, a team of researchers and high school students reflect on their participatory ethnography work in a literacy-focused space within a Philadelphia public high school. The authors collectively explore the critical components of their still-unfolding research: participatory space-building, which entails creating…

As a first-year writing instructor, I generally expect a few mainstays: a handful of bored students, recurring absences, and plenty of covert texting. In order to disrupt the usual lackluster engagement associated with required classes, I approach my writing seminar like a theatre class. By incorporating common performance practices such as the…

The personal essay remains pervasive in high school classrooms, but many curriculum leaders have shifted to stressing the importance of evidence-based, argumentative writing. Some teachers have rightfully lamented this shift, noting that the evidence-based turn in writing instruction comes at the expense of student voice and expression. Students…

This curriculum-based collection of lesson plans is designed to build student confidence for articulating their unique ideas and sensibilities about the world through literary expression. For this book, Jimmy Santiago Baca, one of the foremost poets in America today, collaborates with two National Writing Project Fellows and literacy…

Digital Game Based Learning (DGBL) was considered as an effective way to engage learners and enhance learning performance. This case study demonstrates a design case that uses DGBL to support writing practices using student-centered pedagogy in K-12 education. Minecraft is used as a tool of transferring students' imagination and abstract design to…

One of the many types of texts that can be used in writing education is the diary. In this study, the opinions of the Turkish language teacher candidates about diary keeping and their diaries kept for two months in which they could freely express their thoughts were analyzed. It is a qualitative study in which thirty-four participants' diaries…

This paper describes the principles of transformative pedagogy that lead to the development of distinct student voices in academic writing classes. Whether the course is taught at the undergraduate level through research, expository, and argumentative writing assignments or at the graduate level through literature review essays, research articles,…

Expressivism lost status and respect in composition and rhetoric during the 1990s, despite attempts by some to defend its insights. Few in the field call themselves expressivists today, and yet we can recognize traces of this movement in work by contemporary scholars and theorists. Indeed, the field itself still retains commitments that echo that…

Students from all over the world, from various ethnic and racial communities, make up the student population of the schools in the United States. Each one of them brings to the classroom several unique characteristics. Creative writing and art are both empowering tools that meet the commonality of self-expression. Both are processes "in which…

Sarah DeBacher and Deborah Harris-Moore offer their experiences with teaching in the aftermath of traumatic situations. DeBacher, who taught at the University of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Harris-Moore, who taught at UC Santa Barbara following a mass shooting, explore the difficulty of teaching writing in the wake of…