Although not all teachers can invite scientists into classrooms on a regular basis, they can invite them into their students' worlds through literature. Here the author shares how she used the nonfiction selection, "Science to the Rescue" (Markle 1994), as an opportunity for students to investigate socially significant problems and empower them to…

The current general education program at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, which was initiated in the mid-1990s, represents a much more prescriptive curriculum than the one prior to that time, when students were allowed to choose from a wide variety of courses. In 1999, three faculty members from the Department of Languages and Literatures…

This article seeks to inspire humanities and social science faculty to explore ways of utilizing existing scholarly online communities to engage students in the process of academic inquiry. The author discusses her own experience using a discipline-specific listserv, shares successful assignments, examples of student postings and a grading rubric.…

This study investigated the effect of teacher error feedback on students' ability to write accurately. Three male first-year Physics graduate students at a university in Taiwan participated in this study. They were asked to write a 100-word passage about the greatest invention in human history. Within days of the teacher's grammatical feedback,…

Interrupted formal education is a barrier that makes learning English as an adult an extremely challenging commitment. Besides the many work and family responsibilities that most adult English as a second language (ESL) learners face, students with interrupted formal education (SIFE) often lack familiarity with school-based skills and typical…

Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) is an online tool being used to integrate a writing component in classrooms. In an introductory zoology lecture class, the authors found that CPR-assigned scores were significantly higher than instructor-assigned scores on two of three essay assignments. They also found that neither students' technical-writing skills…

The article examines a group format for promoting Hispanic students' transition from community colleges to university colleges of education. Students were exposed to Hispanic role models, did extensive writing, and participated in reflective discourse within large and small groups during the six-week summer program. All students successfully…

Students of color (in particular, those who are first-generation Chicano/a as well as first-generation college students), form a discourse community with a tendency to rely on dominant color-blind ideology concerning freedom of choice and equal opportunity to explain their positions within the academy. In this article, the author analyzes the…

This article builds on the author's previous research on student learning journals to explore how their use can give students a "space" to engage meaningfully and in their own way with their university work. Drawing on the psychoanalytical concept of transitional space and on notions of narrative, it is argued that the student learning journal can…

Amongst academics working with postgraduate students, there has recently been increasing interest in ways of supporting advanced academic literacy (AAL). This is a concern for us at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where we teach a diverse group of postgraduate students, most of whom are subject practitioners in…

Objectives: The goal of the Intercultural Partnership Project is to introduce students to issues surrounding language and cultural identity, with the ultimate goal of helping students see themselves as engaged participants, rather than observers, in a multicultural community. For students in the intercultural communication class, this goal echoes…

Although handwriting is often considered a matter of presentation, a substantial body of international research suggests that the role of handwriting in children's composing has been neglected. Automaticity in handwriting is now seen as of key importance in composing but this proposition is relatively untested in the UK and the assumption has been…

During the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement's formative years, programs were launched at hundreds of higher education institutions across North America. WAC programs incorporated workshops as the primary delivery mechanism to introduce participants to WAC pedagogy. To explore how workshops changed teaching practices, this study…

This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which the authors have tracked the progress of 20 Social Science students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a historically "white" South African university. The students are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/or speakers of English as a second language.…

This study examines qualitative and quantitative data from a fifteen-week experiential course held in a county jail. The course was modeled after the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, and included college students and people who were incarcerated at the time. Survey data and comments gleaned from student papers were used to assess the impact of…