The role of a professional and creative writing degree is to provide resources, structured workshops, professional interactions--and the potential for creative risk. Opportunities for risk, within the structured environment of the university, challenge the individual's perspectives and judgements, as well as their ability to analyse and to reflect…

This paper is about a writing and literary translation program called Poetry Inside Out (PIO). Students in the PIO program study poetic form and structure, figurative language, and the fundamentals of literary translation in an extended workshop format. During a typical Poetry Inside Out workshop, participants read, discuss, translate and recite…

Creative writing workshops typically feature a gag rule and emphasize purported flaws. This structure limits students' meaningful engagement with each other's work; positions the author as inherently flawed; and positions other participants as authority figures, passing judgment without articulating their aesthetic standards. I propose an…

This cutting-edge guide presents multiple approaches to teaching poetry at the middle and high school levels. The author provides field-tested activities with detailed how-to instructions, as well as advice for how educators can "justify" their teaching within a high-stakes curriculum environment. "Let's Poem" will show pre- and inservice teachers…

Reflecting on the influence of English nursery rhyme poems on one individual Asian child's language development, the paper reviews current studies on the socio-cultural dynamics of creativity, to examine how these theoretical and empirical investigations may help shape specific pedagogical practices in the expressive language arts in a Hong Kong…

Hidalgo County, Texas, is one of the poorest in the country. The population in the Lower Rio Grande Valley is 85% Mexican-American. Underprepared for college and juggling full time jobs, their own children, and sometimes dysfunctional extended families, students often do not expect to succeed. I recently taught a Creative Writing course which…

Examples of what writers and children can do working together are given. (DB)

In "Bird by Bird", Anne Lamott compares writing to a tea ceremony: "That thing you had to force yourself to do--the actual act of writing, turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own…

Generative thinking is explored in this article by chronicling the development of middle school English language learners' poetry writing through their interaction with visual art. The author explains how art conversations (Reilly & Cohen, 2008) were used to help students engage in dialogue about the topic of journeys and how students' paintings…

The notion that "teachers of writing must also write" has been pervasive since the 1970s. But "what" should they write? In the National Writing Project (NWP), a professional network focused on the improvement of writing instruction and featuring summer institutes in which teachers engage in writing of their own as well as demonstrations of…

In the current study, the researchers evaluated the effects of simultaneous prompting and computer-assisted instruction on the story-writing responses of 3 males with autism, 7 to 10 ears of age. Classroom teachers conducted all probe and training sessions. The researchers used a multiple baseline across participants design to evaluate the…

This paper builds on research into using multimedia and hypermedia as creative writing tools and reports on a study in using a hypermedia authoring program with middle-years students at an Australian secondary school. The study explored a classroom where collaborative work built on the technical facilities and expertise of young people. The paper…

Prior to her joining the California Writing Project's (WP) Improving Students' Academic Writing (ISA) program, the author relates how she used to get frustrated when she read her students' essays. As a result of her new understanding gained from her participation at ISA, the author boldly banished traditional literary analysis papers that asked…

"Teaching Middle School Language Arts" is the first book on teaching middle school language arts for multiple intelligences and related twenty-first-century literacies in technologically and ethnically diverse communities. More than 670,000 middle school teachers (grades six through eight) are responsible for educating nearly 13 million students…