Recounts the details of a 2-week summer writing institute for students from grades 3 to 12 that incorporates peer response and revising into civic and creative writing. (MG)

Studies the availability of writing programs at 2-year colleges. Reports that virtually all of the 236 schools that replied to a survey offer composition and most offer such courses as basic and creative writing. States that fewer schools offer advanced or sophomore composition. Concludes that both class sizes and teaching loads exceed…

Describes the efforts of an eighth grade English teacher to convince her students to value class activities such as story telling, creative writing, reading, drama, improvisation, and conversation rather than traditional rote learning activities. Relates actual conversations between the teacher and her students. (PRA)

Presents 10 short articles written by high school and middle school teachers about specific picture books they recommend and how they use them in their classrooms. Concludes with an extensive list of picture books containing examples of specific literary devices. (SR)

Describes how and why a high school English teacher changed her classroom to allot more time for creative writing, to teach a research paper from a personal perspective, and to extend student appreciation of voice and conflict beyond the literature studied in class. Describes how this fostered opportunities for individual growth and transformed…

Describes what inclusion is and how people in the helping professions may unintentionally promote exclusion. Describes the author's use of alphapoems in a course to develop college students' affective learning and advocacy toward people with disabilities. Offers examples of students' work and concludes that alphapoems served to further pedagogical…

Students in a creative writing class at McLean High School (Virginia) were asked to write an original piece of spy fiction. A four-way collaboration model, which utilized the strengths and expertise of a teacher, library media specialist, business partner (the technology division of the CIA), and vendor, provided students with unusual learning…

Shares information about how four African American vernacular English speakers have successfully used their language abilities--the language of their everyday lives--within the context of their expository writing. Discusses principles that have guided one teacher in her work with language diverse students. (TB)

Asserts that 3- to 6-year-olds are capable of types of thinking previously thought possible only by older children and that they readily understand content organized into stories. Offers suggestions for providing a storytelling foundation in Montessori early childhood classrooms, including a "random words" challenge and use of abstract paintings…

Outlines exercises for high school and college students that use student-written poems, published adult poems, and synectics (a game-like forced comparison between dissimilar objects) to help students understand the writer's most powerful comparison device: metaphor. (SR)

This article outlines one potential model for a graduate-level course in community literacy studies. Ellen Cushman and Jeffery Grabill taught this course for the first time at Michigan State University in the spring of 2007. In this article our colleagues with varying disciplinary backgrounds reflect on the course, its readings, and their…

This article describes a combination of a research essay and a creative writing assignment that encourages rigorous academic research while allowing students to get "outside the box" of traditional academic research papers. This assignment has five steps. The first two steps offer the chance to introduce academic research along with summary and…

Designed for teachers, this collection of essays describes successful, practical, classroom-tested ideas for use with students of all ages. The collection presents contributions from 18 teaching creative writers who describe their single best writing assignment that never fails to inspire their students to tell stories, write autobiographical…

This essay considers the many benefits of journal writing. It explains how one person learned, during a 26-mile commute, to talk into a tape recorder slowly, leaving sizable pauses between phrases to facilitate transcription later on; how journal writing is a way to catch moments in the day, to describe a scene or to make connections that one…

A study investigated whether computers would enable students to develop individual working writing environments. The programs that the fourth-grade students used were Hypercard, Clip Art, and MacWrite. Students worked with each of the programs and talked about what they were thinking while using the computer. A constant flow of teachers, staff,…