After presenting a series of assumptions about the teaching of playwriting (for example, that students can be taught the craft, if not the art, of playwriting; students must be kept to a strict deadline if they are to develop into disciplined writers; and playwriting should never be discussed outside the context of production possibilities), this…

Intended for people of all ages and with a history of successful use in schools, workshops, and prison, this book is a guide through a two-week plan of lessons to teach poetry writing. Each lesson builds on the one that came before, and all include poems. Following a preface, the 11 chapters are: (1) Basic Tools; (2) Extending the Metaphor; (3)…

The articles in this journal issue focus on the use of poetry for study in classrooms at all levels. Titles and authors of the articles include (1) "Summoning the Poem: Several Roads to Xanadu" by Ben F. Nelms; (2) "ABC's of Reading and Writing Poetry in Junior High" by Barbara Arnold; (3) "Invitations" by Elizabeth D. Nelms; (4) "Teaching Poetry…

Most performer-writers accept the writing process simply as a means to an end: the shared performance event with a live audience. While writer-performers regard a script as more important than the performance, a solo performance is, however, a showcase of the artist's talent, and creating one's own text offers the performer artistic control. Some…

Writing in the first person is not usually tolerated in academic writing under the illusion that the third person insures some kind of objectivity. But writing in the first person is honest, permitting the reader to know that what is being said is a matter of opinion. It is a direct way of speaking about what a writer sees or feels or thinks, and…

Students in a high school creative writing class increased their awareness of the many aspects of a career choice by using interview questions cited in the article to develop verisimilitude in short-story characters they created. (AJ)

Poetics rather than poems would form the curriculum for an ideal poetry course. (JH)

The purpose of the study reported here was to determine whether pupils in an open classroom differ from traditionally taught pupils on four variables: creative thinking, creative writing, independent decision-making in performing tasks, and self-confidence when facing a new situation. (Author)

This document outlines an approach to secondary school composition instruction, using wordless picture books. Specific published textless books are discussed as aids in stimulating imagination, tapping the need for sense impressions, developing sequences of events, teaching transition and the passage of time, demonstrating point of view, making…

This paper outlines a poetry program for fifth grade students that was intended to help children increase their awareness of their environment, bring order to their own experiences, and increase their sensitivity to the physical base of language. To measure change in the children's use of figurative language in prose writing, each child was asked…

English teachers should prepare students for the act of writing, through prewriting experiences that provide for motivation, collection of data, and ordering of data. Group brainstorming relating to a given topic is helpful in generating ideas for writing; individual brainstorming may be used by students in recalling and listing images. Class and…

Creativity, a means of communicating a personal and unique response to life, should be nurtured and cultivated in the classroom. This document discusses the nature of creativity and, using the analogy of a gardener cultivating a garden, outlines nine steps a teacher may take in developing students' creativity--prepare the soil, plant the garden…

One approach to introducing students to poetry is to have them write and analyze their own poems. Although this approach has some disadvantages, it does serve to tap students' experiences and expressive potential with creative projects and to give them an immediate and direct relationship with the traditional published works. By writing poems…

Dreams can be used to draw students into an authentic expression of their creativity and to give them some validation for what they are as persons. A "dream seminar" in a writing course could have students read and discuss Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"; log, report, and discuss their dreams during the course; and explore other…