We, as community college English teachers, have the opportunity to empower students who have been subjected to years of top-down, teacher-directed education. We have the obligation to make them critical thinkers, improving their chances of being thoughtful and successful adults. It all begins with the way we teach writing and the respect we have…

This article provides commentary on "Investigating the Impact of Literacy-infused Science Intervention on Economically Challenged Students' Science Achievement: A Case Study from a Rural District in Texas" (EJ1306217) which is about the impact of educational interventions on the scientific and academic achievements of students from…

This commentary seeks to encourage reflection upon learning and teaching through story. The authors illustrate ways they have used story in their teaching and what they perceive as the benefits of doing so. They explore how they learned through narrative as children and why they came to value it as a way of seeing and thinking. Then they consider…

In this interview, Susan Wells discusses the teaching of public writing and the work of public rhetoric as they respond to both shifting and recurring political and social contexts. Drawing on insights from her extensive and current work on public rhetoric, including her foundational essay "Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from…

Literacy is the foundation for success in school and society. An essential goal of every school is to help every student read, write and think critically. Dedicated teachers are the catalyst for reaching this goal. The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) developed a literacy professional learning model to better support these dedicated…

This document first identifies multiple assets student veterans often bring to writing classrooms and then acknowledges some of the special considerations that writing instructors and writing program administrators (WPAs) should take into account when working with student veterans. After presenting these generalizations, the document offers…

In this article, the authors propose the use of new terminology when discussing teaching evaluations. Surveys can be considered as providing students an opportunity for "feedback" about teachers, not "evaluations" of teachers. Students, professors, and administrators should not view the surveys as an opportunity to judge a…

In this article, the author discusses how difficult it is for psychology college students to learn to write multiple disciplines of references. It is hard for students to understand why all details have to be written in the right order and the right type-style--depending upon which reference system is used. In this article, the author proposes…

"Let's keep this in perspective," writes Jeff Anderson." The Common Core State Standards are a guiding document." Anderson cautions readers to look beyond such artificial boundaries and dive into pedagogy, process, content knowledge, and research that reveals best practices for teaching writing. Educators, he notes, need…

This commentary offers a critique of literacy pedagogy that focuses solely upon a best practices approach to teaching and learning and argues for a relational pedagogy that relies upon diffractive thinking, reading, and writing.

The author is pleased to have the opportunity to respond to "Measuring Students' Writing Ability on a Computer-Analytic Developmental Scale: An Exploratory Validity Study." The authors of that article have undertaken a challenging project and seem to be on track to developing a technically adequate, practically useful writing…

In this article, the author asserts that whether we write creatively or academically (or both) it takes time to understand the reasons why we "want" to write, and the more we write, the more we fully begin to appreciate why we have to write in the ?rst place. From an early age, nearly every day, Rachel Hains-Wesson actively participated in…

WeiWei Yang, in her forum piece, raises two main criticisms of the authors' "TQ" article on grammatical complexity: "The study the authors conducted [1] is not capable of answering development-related questions and [2] is mathematically questionable" (Yang, 2013, p. 190). In addition, Yang's article has a third goal that is not explicitly…

Although using the five-paragraph formula to teach essay writing is a ubiquitous practice--and many K-12 teachers defend it--Campbell argues that having students write according to this formula does more harm than good. The formula's tight structure stops the very critical thinking students need to do to strengthen their cognition and their…

It is late at night, after working all day on her postdoctoral research Laura Colombo is trying to wind down while drawing and jotting down thoughts in her notebook. She is in the living room/office of her apartment in Buenos Aires, the city where she was born and left when she was 26 years old to pursue her graduate studies in the United States…