The concept of place is more than where people reside. Places are important in shaping the identity and experiences of people. Exploring the idea of relationships with place creates a context that ignites transformative thoughts and actions. "Place' is formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular…

This research project aims to understand the multimodal composing practices and social relationships within the context of my third-grade writing workshop when an alternate approach to teaching writing is employed. This alternate approach disrupts a traditional workshop as the theory of writing is changed to a theory of making in a multimodal…

Preschool children hold immense writing potential that is rarely realized in traditional classrooms. This mixed-methods, quasi-experimental study focused on how best to teach these emergent writers. By comparing the effects of interactive writing, writing workshop, and traditional instruction, the study provided a clearer picture of how these…

Despite the fact that creating motivated writers is of great importance, the recent national focus on low writing scores across the nation have caused schools to concentrate on writing achievement rather than taking the time to help students become lifelong writers. As a result, many students have fallen into a fixed mindset and are unable to move…

School administrators have the challenge of providing high-quality education in all subject areas. Along with this task, administrators must wade through countless programs, curriculums, while ensuring that student needs are met along with required state and local test scores. While the focus on reform has been in math and science, writing…

This study explored the relationship between legibility in handwriting scores and compositional scores of students in grade five in one Northwest Georgia school. The ability to recall and write the letters automatically may impact the composing skills of students engaged in the writing process. Handwriting, often considered a motor skill in young…

The teaching and learning of writing in the elementary classroom setting is a complex process. As students participate in the classroom community and write, they engage not only in the cognitive task of academic writing, but in various social practices as well-negotiating positionality, developing identities, cultivating understandings of genre,…

This dissertation examines a teacher's language ideologies, their impact on curriculum modifications and bilingual Latinx middle schoolers' storytelling, to understand how a bilingual pedagogy builds on their cultural and linguistic resources. This qualitative study was conducted in a sixth grade writing workshop class in New York City as the…

The purposes of this study are to (1) understand how elementary school students use writing to reflect their learning and problem solving in mathematics; and (2) to explore how teachers adapt their instructional approaches based upon reflection on students' writing. This qualitative exploratory study spanned six weeks and included 18…

The purpose of this case study is to document the ways in which fifth-grade students in a historically, low-performing school learned to write from a teacher who did not emphasize test-taking processes. The study demonstrates how these instructional practices in a writing workshop context positively affected the student performance on a statewide…

The study investigated a coach's use of a theoretical framework called the Model of Mastery to assist three teachers in becoming self-regulated in the teaching of writing workshop by moving them through three settings: acquisition, consolidation, and consultation. The goal of the coach was to assist teachers in developing expertise in procedural,…

Writing is an essential component of young children's early literacy development, and active participation in writing instruction contributes to their growth as writers. Providing engaging writing instruction to meet the academically diverse needs of young learners, however, can challenge early childhood teachers. The purpose of this study was to…

The problem is that 5th-grade students are not achieving sufficient writing scores on Georgia state-mandated writing assessments, which the researcher hypothesized was due to the teacher-directed instructional approach utilized at the school. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to determine whether discovery learning, a method based on the…

Teachers frequently read aloud as a part of writing instruction so that children's book authors can serve as mentors for students' writing. Despite extensive anecdotal reporting of the significance of reading aloud children's literature within writing workshop, the intertextual connections students construct between interactive read alouds and…