As writing instructors, the authors spend hours "talking back" to their students through written comments on their drafts. But how do student writers receive their comments, and what do they "do" with this feedback? Teachers invest so much time and energy in their responses to papers. How do they know what gets through, what makes sense to their…

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…

Student transitions into the university are often conceived of via an apprentice-type model, or as entrance into a "community of practice". This paper disputes the applicability of these models to the indeterminate and opaque nature of student experiences of academic writing, and proposes that emotional destabilization and struggles…

Robert Cohen, Assistant Professor English at Fairbanks University, has just completed a contentious meeting of his First Year Composition class, which had discussed a paper written by one of the students. Joe Anderson's paper contained statements that have been historically used as anti-Semitic slogans. Cohen attempted to avoid embarrassing…

The high school dropout crisis in diverse urban communities in the United States is evidence of an endemic disengagement from formal education. The project on which this essay reports utilized visual sociology methods to explore city students' perceptions of schools' purposes, as well as the supports for and impediments to their school success.…

Describes strategies (including the use of multicultural reading materials) for helping culturally diverse students make personal connections with poetry and the creative process. (SR)

Describes three fifth-grade students in the author's school who used humor in their writing assignments. Offers samples of their work and their observations about it. (SR)

Describes how one high school teacher used journal writing and a paper to focus students awareness on prejudice and lack of human compassion in their own school. (SR)

Suggests that educators fundamentally change the way they teach grammar. Offers the author's experience with some curious success with students taking on grammar as part of their writing process, and gives some ideas about starting the teaching of grammar in a radically different place and as a radical agent. Speaks against using student writing…

Explains that students in introductory college history courses were assigned to keep journals and write short, informal pieces on reading assignments. Argues that students found themselves thinking about history in new ways. Includes portions of student writings. Concludes that students grew into active learners, who came to appreciate history as…

Argues that writing teachers must create an organic curriculum with the language of home and community at its core. Suggests that writing teachers help students examine language features, dialects, and language attitudes in their communities. Notes that such student inquiry influences class discussions and can reshape attitudes toward students'…

Describes a teacher's experience of teaching a class entitled "Testimony, Magical Realism, and the Carnivalesque" which focused on the invention of aesthetic means to counter dominant, silencing discourses of power. Explains that students were asked to select a story from their own lives and were required to tell the story in three…

Uses brief accounts by undergraduate students of their experiences with computers and word processing to investigate gender-related differences in attitudes toward computers and to explore why computers seem to reflect back to many women a learned sense of technical incompetence. Focuses on themes of power, caring, and self-esteem. (SR)

Describes how the author's 6 middle school students living in a village in the Yukon, 100 miles off the road system just below the arctic circle, enthusiastically wrote stories or poems about their lives. The students shared their works via an online electronic conferencing system with students from the unimaginably different landscape of the…

The article examines understandings of class, race, gender and sexuality in the writings of secondary school students in two working-class schools in Durban. The analysis of students' questions and responses to a problem page "agony aunt", indicate how class and race come to be expressed through accounts of sexuality. In the letters many…