Considers how nonfiction is the genre most likely to spur children's passion and wonder for learning. Describes how educators teach students that their best writing teachers are the authors they love, not the encyclopedias they need for beginning research. (SG)

Describes a "quick-write" as a 1-3 minute written response to a short piece of writing in which students either write as quickly as they can all that comes to mind in response to the work, or borrow a line from the work and write off that line. (SG)

Discusses work the authors did together addressing racial diversity in a writing center. Foregrounds their differences as well as their mutual vision, creating a bumpy ride for readers and interfering with modernist expectation of oherence, yet exposing the seams they think their readers need to see in order to understand how the fabrics of their…

Explores some queer and performative objections, challenges, and counterproposals to the identity-based pedagogies still dominating composition studies and closely related fields, bringing to the foreground pedagogies that take the instability of identity as a starting point and move toward even greater deconstruction. Proposes a tentative…

Explores limitations of current reflective practices, starting with their ideological roots in the process movement. Highlights ways that students are able to remain distanced from the discursive conventions and social practices that they are ostensibly learning to control. Describes a revised reflective assignment involving student portfolio…

Considers how over 10 years of teaching first-year composition, more than two-thirds of the authors' students have elected to write about things that have caused them sorrow, about the deaths of loved ones, about the deaths of neighbors, even of hope itself. Composes a set of "meditations" - brief essays in which the authors try to understand…

Considers how writing personal and professional narratives together has taught the author the complicated ways in which he uses his early childhood skills in caring for his parents--the importance of routines, transitions, relationship building--and they in turn have prompted him to rethink the early years of life, including the learning of…

Examines the history of process and post-process in composition studies, focusing on ways in which terms, such as "current-traditional rhetoric,""process," and "post-process" have contributed to the discursive construction of reality. Argues that use of the term post-process in the context of second language writing needs to be guided by a…

Provides summary observations on articles presented in this special issue of the journal and makes an appeal for connecting work in second language writing to broader intellectual strands, domains, and dimensions of modern thought and contemporary lived experience. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the kind of assessment that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when educators talk about classroom assessment they talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. Hopes to draw educators into new conversations about assessment and the…

Identifies causal relationships between the development of phonological abilities and progress in knowledge about writing in 90 middle-class Portuguese preschool children. Discusses how two experimental intervention programs proved equivalent in terms of the conceptual evolution they triggered, to the extent that the children in both experimental…

Suggests that in order to help students learn to write effectively in digital media, educators need to develop modes of critical attention responsive to the full range of semiotic components that can be used as signifying elements in electronic work, including animation, sound, graphics, screen design, and navigational functionalities. (SG)

Outlines a professional writing course based on a proposal format that ties the classroom to the student's world. Suggests teaching document forms such as memos, letters, and reports in the context of a comprehensive proposal format. Argues that the proposal can serve as the basis and motivation for an introductory professional writing course. (SG)

Describes how a teacher developed Reflective Fridays (a day with time set aside for reflective thinking, talking, and writing) as a way to support young children in using reflection as a learning tool. Considers ways to nudge students forward. Discusses different types of thinking. Concludes that the author's students have shown her that they…

Considers if a spelling program that is based on explicitly teaching words from children's own writing makes a difference in their conventional use of these words in future writing. Concludes that the spelling list they generated from student writings were not much better at predicting the words students would need for their journal writing than…