As the cost of college tuition continues to soar, community colleges and state and local governments offer a wide range of access and opportunity programs to best serve low-income and academically underprepared students. In this article, I present a case study of two instructors, both of whom regularly teach Basic Writing courses at the community…

This narrative essay describes a basic writing instructor's engagement with student confusion in a hybrid Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) course. The story examines the ways confusion can mark sites of engagement for students and teachers and how ALP courses, in particular, might mediate effective (and ineffective) forms of confusion.

The closing of universities and pK-12 schools in March 2020 pushed teacher preparation programs to explore virtual models of providing teacher candidates with clinical experiences. This case study chronicles a multiple-semester collaboration between a bilingual graduate-level teacher candidate (TC) and university faculty members (authors)…

The purpose of this study was to understand how writing teacher educators, who used research-based practices, make connections to K-12 classrooms for their preservice teacher candidates. A team of eight literacy researchers and educators from institutions across the United States collaborated to conduct a qualitative interview study of 15 writing…

This article is a critique of current approaches to the teaching and assessment of writing in schools in the UK. Successive government initiatives, most particularly the latest (impoverished) version of the English curriculum, are seen as having led to a situation in which pupils are taught in a way that does not improve the quality of their…

In response to the dearth of research on K to 6 teacher preparation for teaching writing, we investigated writing methods course instructors' course assignments. Participants' courses met the following criteria: (a) Courses taken by undergraduate elementary teacher candidates; (b) Writing methods courses; (c) Use of exemplary writing instructional…

In this interview Dr. Bruce Ballenger and I discuss his career, his many textbooks on writing, his recent collaboration on an extensive study of the revision processes of advanced writers, and the challenges of balancing a career with a foot in multiple academic fields (i.e. composition and rhetoric and creative writing). Dr. Ballenger retired…

"Before the Aftermath: A Pedagogy for Disaster Responsiveness" examines how teachers of writing at the college level can respond to social, natural, or political disasters that interrupt their classes. As disaster becomes an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary life, teachers are encountering it in their work, and being forced…

Using portfolio assessment to enhance teaching and learning of writing has been ongoing for more than two decades. Despite extensive research on portfolio assessment, not much attention has been paid to its wider implementation in EFL writing settings where alternative assessment is rarely encouraged. This paper fills this gap by arguing that when…

There is limited research of observed writing instruction in inclusive, secondary diverse urban contexts. This study contributes to the field by investigating four urban secondary English teachers' perceptions of ideal writing instruction as compared with their actual instruction, which is primarily driven by high-stakes accountability measures.…

The question of who is the basic writer threads the history of Basic Writing, characterizing many disciplinary tensions and concerns. When traced to Basic Writing's beginnings as part of open admissions at CUNY, the question often links to Shaughnessy's "Errors and Expectations" as a telling of basic writers' language deficiencies. This…

The Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) Basic Online Literacy Instruction (OLI) Certification is open to GSOLE members and is designed to help online literacy instructors, tutors, and writing program administrators learn foundational principles, theories, and practices of teaching and tutoring writing online and apply those to the…

Although previous studies have examined the impact of online formative assessment on second language learners' writing development, scant attention has been paid to how writing teachers engage with online formative assessment and the influencing factors. By exploring three English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing teachers' engagement with…

Teacher Geneviève DeBose Akinnagbe discusses her school's--and her own--improvement in the area of writing instruction. While she is a strong believer in teacher-led change, she says the change in this case was mainly the result of the school's becoming more intentional, at an organizational level, about the teaching of writing. The progress truly…

In this dissertation project, I interview four therapists and four writing teachers to learn if there were any significant similarities in differences in their approaches to dyadic relationships with students and clients. By dyadic, I mean what happens between individuals in a 1-on-1 setting when subjectivities collide. I was guided in my…