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Writing Instruction

• "Speaking Up" and "Speaking Out": Examining "Voice" in a Reading/Writing Program with Adolescent African-Caribbean Girls
  Examines three significant moments in a weekly reading and writing workshop to reflect on the problematic notion of "coming to voice" for African Caribbean girls aged 14 to 15. Concludes by sharing how the inquiry taught the author some salient lessons in listening to research participants' voices and on the politics and ethics of participatory literacy inquiries.
• All to the Center! Maintaining Equilibrium in the Collaborative Setting
  One of the issues a college writing instructor grapples with in teaching writing is how best to structure collaborative groups to maximize benefit for each student in a multicultural classroom where many students might fairly be considered "marginalized"--to create an environment in which they become "insiders.".
• Beyond an Epcot Nation: Reinventing the Multicultural for Transformative Pedagogy
  This paper critiques multiculturalism from a range of fronts and asks what underlying influence ties together its widespread criticisms. In naming this principal influence, the paper considers what new paths are possible for reinventing the multicultural in composition studies.
• Beyond Internationalization: Multicultural Education in the Professional Writing Contact Zone
  Makes a case for multiculturalism in professional communication studies by examining how international issues have influenced a move from an instrumental to a social orientation. Argues that although multiculturalism in professional communication aligns it with composition studies, it also brings a range of pedagogical, practical, and ethical challenges similar to those faced by composition instructors.
• Billy's Story: Grammar in Context (Rainbow Teachers/Rainbow Students)
  Shows how teaching grammar through writing can be a successful strategy. Points out the steps one teacher used in teaching a writing and grammar process with her sixth graders and illustrates its effectiveness, both with one high-risk student and also through a school disruption caused by fire.
• Creating Opportunities for Emerging Biliteracy
  Outlines instructional principles upon which classroom practices in a fourth grade and in a kindergarten class are based that contribute to students' success, love of literacy, and emerging biliteracy.
• Critical Multiculturalism, Pedagogy, and Rhetorical Theory: A Negotiation of Recognition
  This paper aims to locate multiculturalisms rhetorically, using contemporary rhetorical theorists with which to do so, and using this theorized location to then discuss the implications of critical multiculturalist pedagogy within the writing classroom in shaping new discursive space in the Academy.
• Critical Multiculturalism, Pedagogy, and Rhetorical Theory: A Negotiation of Recognition
  This paper aims to locate multiculturalisms rhetorically, using contemporary rhetorical theorists with which to do so, and using this theorized location to then discuss the implications of a critical multiculturalist pedagogy within the writing classroom in shaping new discursive space in the Academy.
• Developing Writing Skills To Raise Achievement in Science and English at KS2
  Studied the development of writing skills as a way to raise academic achievement for four year-6 ethnic minority students in an English classroom. Identifies strategies that increased achievement and confidence of students and parent participation in their schooling.
• Dramatized Experience, Civil Discourse, Sensitive Issues
  Describes the author's experience when the director and teacher-trainers of a writing program persuaded him that the oral interpretation he wished them to perform was too troubling and explosive to use. Outlines his questions and anguish about the incident, and the urgency of dealing with the dilemmas of multiculturalism, racial intolerance, and the teaching of writing.
• Effective Teaching Strategies That Accommodate Diverse Learners
  This book is about the teaching, instruction, and curricula required to give diverse learners a fighting chance in today's classroom as well as outside the classroom. Guidelines are offered for determining the curricular and instructional priorities in teaching diverse learners, who are typically behind their school-age peers in academic performance and content coverage.
• Evaluating an Intercultural Internet Writing Project through a Framework of Activities and Goals
  A framework for student Internet writing projects is proposed that consists of learning outcome goals and component activities. The framework is intended to be useful when designing and developing Internet writing projects and when evaluating student outcomes.
• Guide to Books on Literacy Published during 1996
  This 173-item annotated bibliography contains books on literacy primarily published in 1996 in the United Kingdom, although some books are included which were omitted from the guide for the previous year. In addition to an annotation, each entry provides author's name, full title, number of pages, place of publication and publisher, and ISBN number and price for both hardback and paperback editions when applicable.
• Literacy and Bilingualism: A Handbook for ALL Teachers
  This handbook provides background information, ideas for classroom instruction, and suggestions for reflective practice for teachers of literacy and bilingual students. All approaches described here encourage the integration of all language skills in teaching literacy.
• Maybe a Colony: And Still Another Critique of the Comp Community
  Argues that a simple celebration of cultural multiplicity while retaining the literacy practices that have maintained the subjugation of too many of America's people of color is insufficient. Points to the connections between colonialism and histories of rhetoric, hoping to start a conversation about "the combat zones as well as the kinder contact zones" of multiculturalism.
• Multicultural Approaches to Argument: Some Practical Suggestions
  It is necessary to continue efforts to adapt the composition curriculum to the diverse needs of the student population. The writing process, even if seen as recursive, varies from student to student and from situation to situation.
• Processing the "Critical" in Literacy Research: Issues of Authority, Ownership, and Representation
  Provides one account of a "messy," critical research process, drawn from a dissertation project: a study of students' and teachers' responses within three university writing courses which were focused on "The American Experience" and which fulfilled the institution's diversity requirement. Aims to achieve some degree of methodological metaknowledge about ways the research process failed to be critical.
• Promoting Multicultural Education through Creative Writing: Crossing Cultures and Genders
  A multicultural literature course at Loyola Marymount University (California) was designed to complicate ideas of culture with gender issues and explored a common but largely unexplored phenomenon--writers who write outside their own personal backgrounds and identities.
• Reflections on Multicultural Language Practices across a District and within a School
  Describes the school climate, the building-level specifics, and some effective teaching strategies that make Western Hills Elementary School an appropriate and successful setting for the development of multicultural language practices. Discusses the partnership between the school district and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the role this partnership plays in supporting the development of multicultural language practices.
• Reflective Activities: Helping Students Connect with Texts. Classroom Practices in Teaching English, Volume 30
  This book offers successful classroom practices that encourage students to learn purposefully and constructively by reflecting on their own learning processes and by making connections between what they read (whether verbal or visual texts) and the lives they lead.
• Service Learning and Multiculturalism: Integrating Cultural Knowledge of Native Elders into the Writing Classroom
  Service-learning experiences can introduce students to locations they typically might not encounter in the composition classroom. This paper discusses a unique program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks that provides a rich and productive contact zone for students.
• Terms of Engagement: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Composition Studies
  Focuses on limitations of postcolonialism for purposes of composition studies and dangers of the decontextualized, desituated use of concepts. Argues that the use of postcolonial materials must be marked by a high degree of vigilance if it is to have any value at all in the composition classroom other than to further careerism and a shallow interest in interdisciplinarity.
• Text Design Patterns in the Writing of Urban African American Students: Teaching to the Cultural Strengths of Students in Multicultural Settings
  Detailed text analysis was used to examine the expository writing patterns of four academically successful African American high school students. These bidialectic students brought culturally influenced text design patterns into the classroom.
• The National Literacy Trust's 1997 International Annotated Bibliography of Books on Literacy
  This 132-item annotated bibliography contains books on literacy primarily published in 1997, in the United Kingdom, although some books are included which were omitted from the guide for the previous year. In addition to an annotation, each entry provides author's name, full title, number of pages, place of publication and publisher, and ISBN number and price for both hardback and paperback editions when applicable.
• The National Literacy Trust's Guide to Books on Literacy Published during 1995
  This 127-item annotated bibliography contains books on literacy primarily published in the United Kingdom in 1995. In addition to an annotation, each entry provides author's name, full title, number of pages, place of publication and publisher, and ISBN number and price for both hardback and paperback editions when applicable.
• Using Role Playing in Argument Papers to Deconstruct Stereotypes
  Describes a writing assignment through which students build an understanding of perspectives other than their own. Shows how students, using dice, can create the outlines of a character and, having thought about this character, can write a paper from that character's perspective.
• Using Whole Language to Incorporate African-American Literature into Developmental Reading/Writing Classes
  Explains how whole language classes differ from traditional developmental classes and illustrates how both African American and Caucasian students benefit from a whole language approach. Makes a case for the importance of using African American literature as well as other literature.
• Voices in English Classrooms: Honoring Diversity and Change. Classroom Practices in Teaching English, Vol. 28
  This book presents a collection of classroom practices that view the personal experiences of diverse student populations as valuable resources for instruction. It offers teachers various responses to the challenges posed by students' cultural, linguistic, and social group affiliations.
• Vygotsky in the Classroom: Mediated Literacy Instruction and Assessment
  Designed to help teachers think about, analyze, and make decisions on literacy instruction, this book provides the conceptual framework and methodology to put the ideas of Lev Vygotsky into practice for classroom literacy instruction. The book claims that Vygotsky's ideas provide a cohesive framework and an operational model that teachers can use to integrate and apply topics in literacy learning such as whole language, emergent literacy, writing, integrating literature in content areas, collaborative learning, teacher decision making, technology as a tool for literacy development, and dynamic assessment for explaining children's diversity in and potential for literacy development.
• Vygotsky in the Classroom: Mediated Literacy Instruction and Assessment
  Designed to help teachers think about, analyze, and make decisions on literacy instruction, this book provides the conceptual framework and methodology to put the ideas of Lev Vygotsky into practice for classroom literacy instruction.
• Writing Trauma, History, Story: The Class(room) as Borderland
  Theorizes the site of teaching and learning. Suggests that the current model of the classroom as multicultural contact zone applies best in those circumstances where there is substantial critical mass, but that in locations where the hegemonic mass far outnumbers the oppositional groups, the model of borderland (broadly conceived) is more productive for critical teaching and learning.