This paper reports on an out of school creative writing collaboration between a grandmother (the author) and her then eleven-year-old granddaughter, and suggests ways in which this may be relevant to writing in school. The narrative is framed and analysed in the light of Donald Graves' concepts of process writing. The paper highlights the…

In this Retrospective I revisit Donald Murray's "A Writer Teaches Writing," fifty years old this year, and argue for a reconsideration of Murray's legacy within composition and rhetoric by claiming that the frame with which scholars and teachers of writing have tended to understand Murray (i.e. Donald Murray = Expressivist) is limiting…

Drawing on four years of anecdotal data and student feedback on course evaluations, this paper provides a retrospective account of the author's experience with teacher candidates in an elementary writing instruction course as first-time authors of children's books, in particular focusing on a writing workshop approach as an effective pedagogical…

The essay regularly comes under attack. It is criticised for being rigidly linear rather than flexible and reflective. I first challenge this view by examining reasons why the essay should be valued as an important genre. Secondly, I propose that in using the essay form students and academics necessarily exemplify their own critical values. Essays…

This article presents two interview strategies used to assess college students' developmental growth toward self-authorship. We illustrate that self-authorship is a foundation for achieving many college learning outcomes and argue that designing practice to promote self-authorship requires understanding how to assess it. We offer a brief overview…