This past summer fifteen teachers from the Detroit public schools and the metro Detroit area participated in Wayne State University's first Invitational Summer Institute as part of the Wayne State Writing Project. As the director of a brand new National Writing Project site, the author was apprehensive about what she could expect from herself, the…

In this article, the author describes an authoring project that familiarizes his students with writing workshops and also provides them a forum for examining key theoretical perspectives about "the relationship between print and other modalities." This project became the focus of an inquiry that addressed the following research questions: (1) What…

Six teacher-researchers (three elementary school teachers, one teacher of hearing-impaired, one Chapter One teacher, and one university researcher) investigated how their membership in a community of writers affected their perceptions of themselves as writers. Three themes emerged in transcriptions of biweekly meetings held over one school year:…

In a method of decentering used in a freshman composition course, collaborative workshopping is employed, beginning with the first meeting, pairing students with semester-long colleagues. Students critique each other's writing at the second class meeting. Differentiating this approach from others is a pedagogy that sees collaboration and…

A study examined and described a program for implementing a writer's workshop to increase the literacy skills of reading and writing. The targeted population consisted of early childhood special education, kindergarten, and first-grade students in a growing, middle class community located in northern Illinois. The problems of poor reading…

This handbook is one of a set of six which provide a systematic means to help students in grades 4 through 8 learn the process of writing while building specific writing skills. The handbook focuses on sentence skills, and offers 30 reproducible lessons, in a variety of formats, to help students write simple, compound, and complex sentences. The…

This handbook is one of a set of six which provide a systematic means to help students in grades 4 through 8 learn the process of writing while building specific writing skills. The handbook focuses on notetaking and outlining skills, and offers 25 reproducible lessons, in a variety of formats, which give students practical experience in…

This report describes the development of a learning community in a fifth-grade writers' workshop across one school year and two girls' participation in the learning community. The report examines ways in which teacher-researchers' and students' notions and actions regarding collaboration changed; it also describes the curriculum in the writers'…

A study determined how exposure to learning writing as process through writing workshops would affect the attitudes of fifth grade students. Subjects had no experience with writing as process. At the outset of the school year, the participants, 23 fifth-grade students in a northeastern New Jersey school, were administered the "Emig-King…

"Politically correct" is a pejorative label applied to activities that in some way question, subvert, or threaten the dominant power structure. In discussing how best to educate students, some composition professionals assume that the composition classroom can be made apolitical. Freshman English, like all classes, is politicized…

A new "remedial" or marginal group has emerged in teacher certification, known in Texas as Alternate Certification. In the Texas program, university graduates earn a certificate upon completion of a rigid state-mandated program. A group of 25 graduate students and their teacher set out to examine their notions of literacy, its…

Jessica Yood argues that Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives can help us better understand how the academy can act in the information age. Drawing on her observations of a newly emerging WAC program, she offers "an alternative approach to the traditional lens we use to look at disciplines or culture" and suggests that we…

Several sections of a regular College Writing 1 class at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania are comprised of a fairly equal number of native and nonnative speakers of English (advanced international students). This diverse writers' community engages throughout the 15-week fall semester in a workshop approach to writing development, following…

After a brief review of the history of college writing instruction, this book examines the undergraduate creative writing workshop. The book attempts to reweave the currently separate strands of college-level creative writing instruction and composition instruction in the belief that developments in these perhaps artificially separated areas can…

A study examined a program for promoting standard writing skill development to facilitate effective communication. Targeted were three regular third- and fourth-grade classes and one bilingual fourth-grade class in growing, middle class communities located west of a large metropolitan area. The lack of developmentally appropriate spelling and…