Describes the approach used with high school advanced placement English classes to a nature-writing project based on the work of Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard. (SR)

Describes a semester-long project for a first-year writing class in which students work collaboratively to research an artist as a person, write an essay as a monologue, and present the monologue as a one-person play to the class. (SR)

Discusses why two high school teachers in Kentucky teach the novel "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, discussing their beginnings, their experiences, their approach, and their goals and criteria. Discusses prereading, reading, and postreading activities. Discusses concerns raised by teachers regarding student maturity and parental approval, and…

Many students conceive of learning institutions as factories and of writing as the delivery of a predictable product. An excerpt from a typical student theme reflects the fact that much student writing is hardly more than an assemblage of cliches. Teachers can show students the stereotyped nature of typical student writing by constructing a…

Describes a first-year course in teaching language arts for teacher education students. Shows students and teachers reveling in language and literacy. Describes the tone, attitudes, and methods of the course, which uses language energetically to amuse and enthuse, modelling language as a vital tool employed with power and enjoyment for many…

Describes a writing assignment in which students study and imitate the language of a minority author. Discusses how the assignment helps negotiate conflicts when students resist multicultural literature, as their creative responses mediate between themselves and works they might otherwise find foreign and antagonistic. (SR)

Describes an exploration the author and his seventh-grade students undertook as they wrote essays about objects of personal significance. Describes how they examined a piece of literature (an essay) as a model for their own writing, how they spent some time talking and listening to one another about their personal objects, and how they then wrote…

Intended to serve as a general model for the teaching of poetry writing, and written from the perspective of one individual teacher's thinking and experience, this guide, although originally written for teachers of seventh and eighth graders, is adaptable to other levels--elementary, high school, and college. Chapter 1, "Students and…