In this essay, I examine the problems I now see with the sample curriculum I proposed in "College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for Writing Instruction" in 2007. There are numerous factors that must be considered in designing a writing course: choice of subject matter, choice of genres to assign, sequencing of writing assignments, number of…

Motivation, one of the leading problems in education, is an ongoing issue for teachers. Motivation is important because it highly contributes to achievement. Teachers have to be certain that their students are being motivated in order to develop a positive outcome. This article suggests some strategies to sustain students' classroom motivation.

Multimodal writing is considered as a "new" way of composing, or, somewhat cynically, as a strategy for adding relevance or interest to a required composition course. Jody Shipka's "A Multimodal Task-Based Framework for Composing" suggests that "students' uptakes of a much wider, richer repertoire of semiotic resources,…

An assignment to write a dialogue differs little from that of writing a traditional essay. Writing a dialogue requires students to combine traditional academic requirements--such as information literacy, writing competency, and critical thinking--with a healthy dose of imagination, creativity, and individuality. In practice, assignments to write…

Contemporary argument increasingly relies on quantitative information and reasoning, yet our profession neglects to view these means of persuasion as central to rhetorical arts. Such omission ironically serves to privilege quantitative arguments as above "mere rhetoric." Changes are needed to our textbooks, writing assignments, and instructor…

Amy Lynch-Biniek begins by introducing popular yet controversial concepts presented in the Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's "They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing" (NY: Norton & Company, 2006). As stated in the book's introduction, the goal of Graff and Birkenstein's text is "to demystify academic…

Because Dominique (or D-Mon, as he liked to be called) had drill before class, he would sometimes come in late in the author's class, his army boots silently moving across the tile as though he were trying to sneak by a sentry. The army fatigues that he wore were supposed to help him blend into a desert landscape, a tan-and-brown world of sand. In…

This article considers the emotional and psychological complexities of responding to personal narratives when the focus is war. The author teaches at a community college and she always begins her semester with a narrative assignment for the usual reasons: students write better when they write what they know; teachers should scaffold writing…

In this article the author tells the story of her experiences with a high school U.S. literature class composed of English language learners (ELLs). The students were from a variety of nations and cultures, spoke several different languages, and had a wide range of English proficiency levels. During their time together, the author and students…

As online learning continues to grow each year, so do the number of new media and Web 2.0 technologies faculty have at their disposal, yet the majority of online courses remain heavily text-based. Online learning often mirrors the traditional classroom, with a focus on read and write (and at times discuss)--sometimes with good reason. One of the…

In March 2009, a faculty member and four political science students led a forum entitled "Wikis in the Classroom: Student and Faculty Perspective." The discussion centered on a number of benefits and concerns with the use of wikis as an instructional tool within the classroom. Based on student and faculty feedback, this article expands on four…

The teacher's of America's one-room schoolhouses long ago mastered the concept of differentiation. Small class sizes were the norm, including children of all ages. Older, or more advanced students, helped others understand their lessons. Students move on to more difficult work as they were ready. Skipping grades was not uncommon. As the population…

A paramount duty of education is to prepare young people for their role as citizens in a democratic society. Voting is one of the important responsibilities of a citizen but statistics indicate that young people often don't vote and don't believe they have a stake in the outcome of the presidential election. Storypath is a teaching strategy that…

Despite the general trend to embrace interdisciplinarity in post-secondary education, we remain remarkably unclear concerning what we mean by interdisciplinarity and how it is achieved. Reporting on research conducted in a team-taught interdisciplinary course, I propose a new way of conceptualizing interdisciplinary connections, grounded in…

If a liberal arts education should prepare our students to participate in a meaningful way in democracy, what does that mean for how we design our courses across disciplines? In this paper, I first address the question: who should teach democratic skills? Using an upper-level course in Canadian politics, I then illustrate how to explicitly…