Adolescent youth participating in a summer writing workshop drew from funds of community wealth to answer youth-generated inquiry questions about history, political participation, and equity. By turning to community members as expert sources of knowledge, students deepened their inquiry, their connections to the local community, and their…

As writers are increasingly required to leave their ways of knowing, doing and being at the doors of their classrooms, this article explores what happens when teachers of writers open those doors and mobilize the "Writing Realities" framework's interrelated principles of "writer-identity," "critical literacies,"…

The Oregon Writing Project Curriculum Camp provides spaces where teachers can work together to grow their own curriculum about issues that matter to their communities, from gentrification to high school student activism to Mexican immigration. The Curriculum Camp supports teachers to become activists who develop lessons that help their students…

The purpose of this article is to describe, examine, and make a case for the value of a Continuing Professional Development week-long summer institute offered to teachers from across the education continuum -- from early childhood, through primary, secondary, further and higher education. At the institute participants could meet, learn and share…

This article describes the development and iterations of the English 0111 Composition Workshop-the Texas Success Initiative (TSI), at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). The TSI is a program that determines college-readiness standards in reading, writing, and math. The initial structure of English 0111 was similar to the structure used in…

Transnational students, that is, those who have had one or more years of schooling in the US and are now in school in Mexico, make up a sizeable and growing population. For these students, the language of the home, Spanish, abruptly becomes the language of school and what was the language of school and socialization outside the home, English, is…

Partnerships between writing across the curriculum (WAC) and civic engagement (CE) programs are not given much attention but these partnerships improve each program significantly. CE programs can borrow models from WAC for professional development and obtain support for specific kinds of writing assignments; WAC programs can find among CE…

This article details a project with students who are refugees who read and wrote about the refugee experience to give the instructor important information about their lives. The high school students first read various texts about the refugee experience that guided their class discussions, journal writing, and graphic illustrations of their…

This study explored three purposefully-sampled avid adolescent male writers' experiences at a residential summer writing workshop program. It investigated how the social context of the program influenced the writing of the focal students, the ways that they identified themselves as writers, and the risks that they took in their works. It also…

This comparative study identified the differences between gifted children's offline and online peer feedback within a summer talented writer's workshop. Researchers analyzed ten students' writings for degrees of critical thinking evident in their feedback. Online feedback included students' writings in social writing sites Storybird.com and…

Students who graduate from high school who are college-ready are more likely to graduate than those who are not college-ready. The need for remediation on college campuses burdens both students and institutions with financial and opportunity costs that at best delay, and at worst impede graduation rates. At a time when workforce preparation skills…

Four-week summer academy programs served homeless children and adults in two contiguous innovative learning programs. The programs may be the first of their kind in the homeless literature in which both adults and children were exposed to career, academic, and leadership opportunities in the supportive learning environment of a university campus,…

This study explored how voice developed in the English writing of 57 Chinese teachers of English who participated in a three-week writing workshop during a summer institute in a large, urban school district in southeastern China. Teachers from grades three through twelve wrote daily in English in a workshop environment. Primary data sources were…

The notion that "teachers of writing must also write" has been pervasive since the 1970s. But "what" should they write? In the National Writing Project (NWP), a professional network focused on the improvement of writing instruction and featuring summer institutes in which teachers engage in writing of their own as well as demonstrations of…

Since 2004, the author has been facilitating a creative writing program for teenagers at the historic Paul Robeson House, centrally located in the urban community of West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Begun as an intensive five-day summer workshop, Teen Writers Academy has expanded to offer ten-session Saturday workshops during the spring, two…