This article describes the increasing pressures on those who teach graduate seminars in composition pedagogy to cover a broad range of texts, topics, and techniques. It argues that in response, pedagogy instructors may need to deliberately (re)design their courses in order to continue to help new writing instructors engage in inquiry and…

In this book, author Peggy Campbell-Rush shares the strategies she relies on to teach young students not only how to read and write, but also to love to read and write. Teachers will find close to 100 tips, ideas, and activities that they can implement immediately, including: the dos and don'ts for reading aloud; putting new twists on tedious…

In this article, the author focuses on first grade readers and writers who revisit their work and describes what first-graders do when they revisit their writing about science and literature and review collections of their work. The first-graders discussed here are in Elaine O'Connor's classroom at Clark Elementary School in Charlottesville. In a…

Site leaders at the Southern Arizona Writing Project needed to increase their pool of summer institute applicants, so they created a plan to recruit early. They invited interested teachers, principals, and district administrators to attend their "Slice of SAWP" on the last day of the summer institute. The site sent out acceptance letters…

Thomas Sayers Ellis, assistant professor of creative writing at New York's Sarah Lawrence College, is one of many scholars fighting for the soul of Black poetry, a struggle that takes place largely off-campus. Unless one is accepted into a top-level graduate poetry program, such as Boston University's program or the Iowa Writing Workshop, a poet's…

This photo essay includes children's reflections on the opportunities offered by Artists/Writers Workshop for meaning-making in two languages--the language of pictures and the language of words. As students move back and forth between pictures and words, they experience transmediation. They create new meanings, find new and stronger voices, and…

One professor's motives in organizing writing workshops with panels of faculty members talking in their fields about writing issues were both political and philosophical. As director of the writing center at the Claremont Graduate School, in 1993 she feared that with latest round of budget cuts the writing center was in danger of elimination.…

In a creative writing workshop of seven male and nine female graduate students, two female students became increasingly aware of a sexual bias. Though the male instructor made an effort to create a non-hierarchical, student-centered environment, informal hierarchies developed among students that granted the male instructor and the male students…

Mikhail Bakhtin's understanding of the medieval carnival--a time when life is turned upside down, social hierarchies are lifted, and the lines between performer and participant are blurred--provides a useful framework for understanding both liberatory and potentially threatening aspects of writing workshops in elementary schools. An experimental…

At the University of Rhode Island, instructors in English and other disciplines are looking critically at the writing program. At present that program offers a range of basic, intermediate and advanced undergraduate writing classes--courses that are grounded in at least two sets of assumptions that deserve scrutiny. The first set of assumptions…

A series of five studies examined factors that influence how students respond to questions on a writing apprehension test. In the first study, the Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Test was administered 4 times to 34 students in 2 freshman composition classes. Conventional scoring of test results were inconclusive--the total score for all students…

Two instructors with different approaches to writing collaborated in the preparation of a junior-level advanced college composition course. Both instructors were concerned about the applicability of the "workshop" in teaching composition, and about the question of how to address authority in the workshops. Students were asked to respond…

The research reported in this paper is a case study of one student's learning in a writers' workshop where two teacher-researchers were developing new curriculum and instructional practices. The case study was developed out of a larger qualitative study in which 47 fifth-grade students' growth as writers was studied over a 1-year period as they…

A writing workshop held during a school holiday in an urban center in Southern Africa illustrated the premise that writing experiences with literary patrons can result in benefits for young authors. The workshop was planned with the purpose of encouraging children to write in a setting that emphasized the establishment of a children's library, a…

Experience and research have shown that writing workshops are an excellent tool for improving workers' writing skills. In the past 5 years, the emphasis of writing instruction has shifted from a focus primarily on handwriting, correct spelling, and simple reinforcement of skills to a focus on empowering students by emphasizing fluency and student…