Describes six activities from the "History Alive" program. These include an interactive slide lecture on the Great Depression, a photographic analysis regarding Mexican and Southwest culture, an experiential exercise concerning life on the assembly line, collages on Chinese belief systems, a response group on women's rights, and poetry writing.…

Describes a workshop used with classes doing Web research for their English papers in a computer lab. Shows how this is a good opportunity for students to learn to find, evaluate, and save Web sources, how to read critically and annotate the sources, and how to weave them into working drafts and avoid plagiarism. (SR)

Maintains that creative writing should be no less a part of the elementary social-studies writing program than other expository forms. Discusses using the poetic form, the cinquain, to teach about Mexican vaqueras and vaqueros in an elementary unit on the American Southwest. Includes illustrations and instructional materials. (MJP)

A goal of this double issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique is to collectively consider what we mean when we talk about knowledge about language. How have our understandings changed over time? What are the implications of these new understandings for pedagogy in the field of language teaching? These are necessary and important…

For years, the author has been a fan of assigning students in business communication classes to draft messages that explained complex decisions or situations. The assignment is the author's variation of the negative or bad news message. This traditional genre has generated a new Web-based method by which people and organizations respond to public…

This article outlines the design of a new service-learning component central to a graduate course on teaching elementary and middle school writing. The service-learning involves course participants acting as mentors to middle school students as they write personal histories of local African American, Cape Verdean, and Puerto Rican senior citizens.…

"Lessons in Character" is designed to promote elementary and middle school students' knowledge about core character education values and, through that knowledge, shape children's positive behaviors and support academic success. It consists of 24 lessons organized around weekly themes, taught through stories, writing activities, and class…

As part of a larger ethnographic project addressing the construction of gender through literacy, this study focused on understanding how the children in one writing process classroom expressed their social selves in their written compositions, as well as how those compositions were engineered within the social dynamics of the classroom. The study…

This case study involved designing an electronic-based environment to explore the effectiveness of electronic mail (e-mail) as a writing tool for dialogue journaling. The setting for this study was an intermediate-level reading and writing class in the American English Institute Program on the campus of a large public university. Over a period of…

Beginning college writers often approach the writing classroom with attitudes of fear and alienation. Fostering partnerships between instructor and students allows these writers to extend their private selves, affirm their identities, and connect to larger audiences. Letter writing can help establish an authentic connection between instructor and…

Addressing the expressed needs of the writing community, this book presents writing lessons for intermediate, middle school, and secondary school students that incorporate the 5-step writing process into content areas as a natural part of the curriculum. The 30 lessons in this book involve students in large and small groups and in individual…

Using reflective writing throughout the composition course yields better reflective writing for composition portfolios. As writing courses make increasing use of portfolios for individual and program assessment, reflective writing will become more and more important. Brief reflective statements of as little as one paragraph, even when done as a…

Noting that the literature of the Vietnam War can have a powerful impact on students, this paper discusses why such literature should be taught, what types of literature should be taught, and how teachers might go about teaching some of the literature. The paper begins by presenting numerous student responses to various novels on the Vietnam War,…

This paper describes a graduate course using biographical materials for teachers to work through their understandings of reading and writing as personal, valuable processes. The course consists of three parts; each session begins with the reading of a children's picture book that deals with reading and writing; next, the class reads the…

Both curricular reformers and writing specialists believe a connection exists between critical thinking and writing, however two obstacles have prevented any conclusion from emerging. One is that there is no established shared understanding of what "critical thinking" means. The other is that no one knows how to measure it, even though…