A prominent writer and researcher studied a 1st grade writing workshop to understand why the students had such insight into the craft of writing. Videotape footage revealed the importance of authenticity as an aspect of expert teaching, particularly as it relates to authentic questions, authentic studies, and authentic work. Authentic…

The sharing of classroom experiences and discussing relevant research have led teachers and their teacher inquiry support group to take risks in their instruction, leading to meaningful and productive change in their classrooms. The reflective practitioners in the teacher inquiry support group are committed to the creation of democratic classroom…

The reforms of both literary studies and composition are essential if English department wants to remain integral to the liberal arts curriculum. English studies integrates work in literature, language studies and culture with horizontally writing instruction and not hierarchically.

"Of the many difficulties young writers may encounter when engaged in the complex act of writing, crafting sentences that accurately convey their intended meaning is particularly challenging. Sentence combining can provide systematic instruction in sentence-construction skills within an overall framework of the writing workshop."

In this paper I attempt to do three things. Firstly, I explore the concept of resistance in the sociology of youth and education. I raise questions about the power of this concept to provide a descriptive language for understanding the way young people generally, and in this paper, young African-Caribbean men in London schools, deal with the…

This article examines a writing textbook published in the People's Republic of China over two editions. I will argue that competing ideologies have constantly and in multifold manners dictated the ways this textbook was produced, disseminated, consumed, and reproduced--the rhetoric for a textbook's production and existence.

I argue that examining two collections of essays designed for the preparation of new writing teachers and published twenty years apart provides some important clues to what has occurred to composition studies in the interval. Building on the framework I established in two previous CCC articles, I argue that composition studies has become a less…

In this article, the author argues the common assumption among teachers that the traditional academic essay is the most appropriate sustained writing activity for students. As a feminist, the author believes that the traditional academic essay considers a positivist, patriarchal epistemology that governs beliefs about knowledge and teaching…

Writing across the curriculum has been a pedagogy associated with faculty development since the earliest days of the movement. Carleton College, an early adopter of WAC pedagogy and faculty development, has, in the last decade, added portfolio assessment to the combination with positive results. Among the unexpected consequences has been a…

Students in higher learning institutions need to write lots of reports based on the projects done. Since they are at the tertiary level of education, they are required to use English in their reports. This is to ensure that they are able to function well in English later at the workplace. Writing requires students to apply rules regarding sentence…

This essay responds to Jane Danielewicz's and Peter Elbow's recent piece on contract grading in "College Composition and Communication" (December 2009). I discuss the similarities of their approach to my own contract process, finding that we share a quantitative/performative method for grading. I also explore our differences. While they guarantee…

This article defines applied rhetorical work as integral to the intellectual work of writing program administration and asks our professional organizations to classify it as such within our position statements. With a specific case, it offers a generative framework for representing and assessing the work's scholarly commons for professional…

A classroom teacher reflects on the benefits of professional development leading to improved and energized student writing. Although traditional professional development sparked interest and encouraged modifications, the support of a teacher inquiry group as ongoing professional development provided the impact needed to effect significant change…

This article examines the qualitative findings from a mixed-methods comparison study of the use of an online multi-user virtual environment called Anytown which supplemented face-to-face writing instruction in a fourth grade classroom to determine implications for the design of such environments and the reported impact of this design on students…

While formal, standardized assessment instruments provide valuable and necessary information about students' various abilities and skills, the use of informal and qualitative assessment approaches has the benefit of leading directly to instruction based squarely on an individual student's needs, strengths, and existing skills. This article…