This study delves into the complex relationship between storytelling and historical understanding. Focused on how lower-secondary students employ narrative discourse in writing, it examines the extent to which their storytelling aids or limits historical comprehension. Drawing on systemic-functional linguistics and history education theories, the…

The traditional academic research paper isn't always the best form in which to judge student writing. When students are given a choice in form and genre, their true talents and creativity can be unleashed. Miller offers up classroom examples and ideas on how to let students express their creativity in writing literary papers, research papers, and…

Unlike intelligence, creativity has rarely been investigated from the standpoint of cross-cultural invariance of the structure of the instruments used to measure it. In the study reported in this article, we investigated the cross-cultural invariance of expert ratings of creative stories written by undergraduate students from the Russian…

Writing is a complex and learned activity in that it requires us to shape our thoughts into words and texts that are appropriate for the purpose, audience and medium of a variety of communicative forms. Writers must constantly make decisions about how to represent their subject matter and themselves through language. In this way, writing can be…

This article makes a case for the centrality of yearning in fictional representations of characters. With the help of illustrations from Adam Phillips, Olen Butler and Ted Hughes I argue that this key element may be missing from the creative work of students. This is my attempt, through exercises and other stimuli, to generate this yearning or…

Eight students who excelled in a statewide, middle school creative writing tournament discussed their relationships with writing. Students' interview transcripts were analyzed for references to positive and negative teacher influences. Students needed teachers who provided structured writing time and clear deadlines, valued the message of the work…

Donald Graves's early professional books inspired Koshewa to look more deeply into student writing during the 1980s, and to value all phases of the writing process. Graves's perspective on uncovering and celebrating voice elevated Koshewa's writing instruction to a new plane. In this article, he writes about the impact that Donald Graves's work…

In teaching a research-writing unit, the author has asked her students to research and write a persuasive speech, a multigenre paper, an I-Search, a historical and comparative connection to literature, a country brochure, and a social criticism essay. While she found benefits and disadvantages in all of these assignments, the author was…