A widespread movement is underway to shift from teacher-centered toward more student-centered learning. Teachers are being encouraged to lecture less and lead more discussions, to be less directive and more facilitative. Students are being encouraged to be less passive and more participatory. In a magazine writing class, an instructor asked his…

Intellectuals lament the disappearance of community, a nostalgia for the small town that has supposedly given way to the anonymous crowds of the city. Likewise, scholars have talked about "discourse communities" in romantic terms, referring to a place where all share the same values. However, a more urban view of social life, in which…

The personal journal is a combination of class notebook and diary, a repository of entries which are recorded on a regular basis, are ungraded, and which remain confidential. As an instructional tool, the journal is virtually limitless. Studies have demonstrated the practical applications of journal writing for educators in the following areas:…

Any college English teacher who seriously seeks to bridge the academic and corporate learning communities must learn from rather than laugh at the industrial mindset. Mediating between composition theorists' process-oriented pedagogies and the type of linear writing instruction the corporate mind values is essential in the corporate classroom. The…

Suggesting that all phases of writing, including revision, have a great deal in common across age groups and levels of accomplishment, this book presents 196 specific revision exercises, as well as numerous examples from students and from literature. The first part of the book looks at how the ability to revise develops, and at how people can use…

Illustrating that the Bread Loaf Grants Program is cost-effective and beneficial, this collection presents reports and articles by and about teachers and students involved in staff and curriculum development projects funded by the program. The collection concludes that the projects demonstrate that literacy flourishes in settings where children…

Short analytical writing exercises were designed to develop critical thinking and writing skills; stimulate creative thinking and writing; promote learning of psychological concepts; and to assess student knowledge. Design of these assignments was based on Bloom's taxonomy of multiple levels of critical thinking: recall, comprehension,…

Richard Hugo's thinking about teaching creative writing can enhance the composition classroom: he offered both practical pointers about writing and advice about self-discovery for all writers. His pedagogy was directed at the most common elements in all writers--their humanity and their relationships to language, ideas, and feelings. "The…

As teaching assistants, graduate students are often thrown into the deep waters of their first courses with little or no direction, instruction, or support. Teacher training programs offer little help in achieving a sense of professional teaching or classroom methodology. The Mentor program of Radford University's English Department provides an…

Research papers produced by students in college composition classes are often boring, poorly written, and disappointing. One way to help students overcome their inability to write decent research reports is to assign them the task of handing in a three page trial-run mock research paper about three weeks before the final essay is due. They must…

Undergraduate students are routinely assigned a long research paper--surely the most complex intellectual skill ever expected from them--and expected to write it with a minimum of teacher and library interference and with thorough faith in the end product. More than anything else, the traditional approach to directing research papers focused on…

Those in composition studies know, experientially, that teaching informs their lives and results in knowledge, but they also know that English Studies culture(s) continue to valorize expert knowledge over community knowledge, empirical and scholarly research over alternate methods of constructing inquiry, and theory over practice. Although…

An action research project developed a program for improving writing skills. The targeted population consisted of second through fifth grade students in two districts in growing middle to upper class communities, located in suburbs southwest of Chicago. The need for improving writing skills was evidenced by classroom teacher observations,…

A student's participation on two listserves added new depth and new complexities to her overall learning process. The listserves (one just for her composition class at California State University San Bernardino and one that linked her class to two other composition classes at distant universities) created a community of people who had access to a…

A multicultural literature course at Loyola Marymount University (California) was designed to complicate ideas of culture with gender issues and explored a common but largely unexplored phenomenon--writers who write outside their own personal backgrounds and identities. The course drew from research on "women's way of knowing" and…