After ten years of public school teaching and countless student teaching observations, the author knows firsthand that English language arts (ELA) teachers are committed to teaching researched argumentative writing and, further, they often frame their assignments as questions. In this article, the author proposes that ELA teachers accelerate…

To invite students to write about death is to explore an opulent and rich world of sorrow and emotion. It is a world that demands understanding and that engages students in a truly visceral way. And, it is an assignment that incorporates personal discovery with social and political issues, stretching writers in ways that many assignments do not.…

In this article, Kate Collins begins by explaining how she discovered that "Hamilton: An American Musical," a Broadway show that incorporates a mix of musical genres: hip-hop, jazz, classic show tunes, and show-stopper numbers based on the life of Alexander Hamilton, could be brought into her teaching as a rich resource for her high…

To combat the inevitable intellectual fatigue that autobiographical essay assignments often engender and, more importantly, to provide students with an authentic audience and purpose for their writing, the author designed an autobiographical assignment that liberates students from the traditional essay format while empowering them to envision…

In 2007, Jake, the author's 14-year-old son, died. Though he had a known heart condition, Jake was vibrant and lived a life with no restrictions. The heart attack that killed him was unexpected. As a teacher, the author was left with the question of how to return to the classroom and what she would share with the students. This article explores…

This article describes a writing assignment called Conversations with Myself (CWM) in which students "talk back" to subtractive dominant narratives through a two-part process of text analysis and autobiographical, dialogic writing. The author presents a case study of Stephen (all names are pseudonyms) to illustrate how literacy supported…

The author describes how the production and reception of popular culture can be studied in secondary classrooms using Wendy Griswold's cultural diamond to better understand the homogenizing of content and the limiting of alternative viewpoints.

Writing and communication skills are important in all fields of employment. During the course of everyday life, people have to perform tasks they have never done before, or learn a technology they have never used. Most tasks are processes, and it takes some time to learn how they work. Instructions are the most common method of explaining how to…

When a student in a community-based writing program asked to write science fiction (SF), rather than a personal essay, he prompted the staff to expand the scope of the program's curriculum. This article describes how SF became another avenue for discussing community change. However, instead of just evaluating their worlds and writing about what…

Revisiting the writing assignments that the author has given to his sophomores and juniors over the past four years, he can identify patterns that have complicated their writing development. This article explores how Aristotle's enthymeme can serve as an effective prewriting tool for literary analysis in the high school classroom. By foregrounding…

Conducting primary research through digital video (DV) can allow students to experience meaning-making firsthand, gaining empathy and understanding for their subjects. Two practical reasons for encouraging students to use DV are that students are already using the technology outside of school and that the digital culture demands digital literacy.…

This study features an analysis of more than 100 "multimodal autobiographies" that have been created as videos or PowerPoint presentations by preservice teachers during a seven-year period; trends in the data as well as implications for the preservice teachers' future practices are discussed.

The author describes two students creating narrative versions of an event from Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" to portray conflicts in characters' interactions to address the issue of sex abuse. Through rewriting events in texts, students gain a sense of how use of dialogue can serve to portray larger underlying tensions between…

The author shows how using art helped a blind student in an AP class and students in Creative and Practical Writing classes improve writing proficiency and critical thinking.

Thomas Nunnally equates five-paragraph format essays with square cucumbers found at farmer's markets: they have an established structure but no argument. The real square cucumbers are students who need a formula to write competently. By providing students with a real audience, a teacher can show that he or she takes students' desires -- and…