Having students read news articles or novels, watch television snippets, engage in class discussions, essay-writing, emailing, and drafting letters are excellent ways to broach any number of society's systemic and oppressive social maladies. Engaging in these activities in the English language arts classroom can serve as a catalyst to encourage…

This article focuses on how adolescent writers took up an invitation to write and share a piece of work in school that wasn't tied to a grade. Students' responses to this invitation are examined in an effort to revise some of the typical approaches to teaching writing.

On a February morning, Ms. Nelson (all names pseudonyms) was preparing her eleventh-grade class for a new unit with the goal of crafting arguments about the people and issues present in the classic novel "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe. As, teacher educators Eileen Shanahan and Min-Young Kim were observing in the classroom, it was…

Process and product are always in tension. In authentic writing, they can be messy and hard to assess. Because writing is recursive and generative, every word written opens new possibilities. Not only that, but writing is influenced by ability, time allowed, task definition, rhetorical situation, relationship to reading, and helpful thinking…

Educational simulations provide students authentic contexts. These authentic contexts require situated and complex real-world arguments. Such writing scenarios help students recognize why there are often multiple interpretations of evidence, who their audience is, what they want, and what kind of genre is needed. Playable Case Studies help…

Considers ways to successfully create an online community. Suggests that one way to engage students and encourage them to want to take responsibility and ownership for their learning is to construct a learning environment that places their ideas at the center of the learning process, not the completion of the course assignments. (SG)

Relates the experiences of a teacher who consciously reconceived his teaching as a part of a process--to think of instructional goals as provisional rather than set. Outlines his six goals dealing with teaching and experiencing literature. Discusses teaching techniques such as test rendering, response history, and portfolios. (PRA)

Indicated that students have definite ideas about which commenting strategies on their written compositions help and which do not. Found that students wanted reasons and written comments from teachers as opposed to circles and abbreviations they cannot understand. Showed that high school and college subjects differed significantly on some survey…