This article offers an overview of a first-year writing course in Aotearoa New Zealand, Tu Kupu: Writing and Inquiry, which forms part of a core Bachelor of Arts (BA) curriculum with "citizenship" as a key theme. I situate the course in the context of the tertiary sector in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the social and political contexts for…

This article addresses the characteristics of learners in the emergent stage of literacy development and describes two instructional practices that facilitate the development of the alphabetic principle and concept of word in text.

Understanding writing as a performative material practice, this paper highlights the "imperative" as a strategy to enhance writing practices in our classrooms and academic workshops. Drawing on posthuman theories and intra-active relationships, it describes how performative arts-based writing can provide a way to engage with the human…

We propose the self-regulation view in writing-to-learn as a promising theoretical perspective that draws on models of self-regulated learning theory and cognitive load theory. According to this theoretical perspective, writing has the potential to scaffold self-regulated learning due to the cognitive offloading written text generally offers as an…

This article, based on Andrea Walsh's teaching experience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), focuses on a strategy to inspire students to approach the revision process proactively with imagination and critical insight: envisioning essays as documentary films. It first looks at some central tasks of revision and then explores the…

When students write informational text, they have the opportunity to engage with meaningful topics, become curious about the world, learn domain-specific knowledge, and use academic vocabulary. Given the possibilities for learning through writing informational text, it is important for teachers to reflect on and improve their informational writing…

Developmental psychologists are increasingly writing articles, columns, books, and blogs for the general public, but this type of writing can be challenging. Here, I provide guidance on how to communicate scientific ideas to nonscientists, touching on what content to cover, how to organize that content, what language to use, and what tone to…

Many students are experiencing precarity in the current political climate. School walls are permeable, and even the best efforts of teachers to create safe environments where young people can learn about and express themselves cannot fully insulate the classroom from the vulnerabilities produced outside of it. These vulnerabilities may inspire, in…

Teachers everywhere are embracing the challenge of conveying differences in literacy practices across fields of study. However, whereas disciplinary literacy and inquiry approaches are expanding in popularity at the secondary level, few resources exist for teaching discipline-specific writing in the elementary grades. The authors describe three…

Positioned within our field's work on supporting transfer of writing-related knowledge through careful course design, this article describes the development of a pedagogical intervention designed to help students identify knowledge gaps and pose questions about rhetoric and genre. Below, I tell the story of a 2012 teacher research study that…

Writing is a complex and difficult skill for many middle-level students. Therefore, teachers must invest considerable time and apply evidence-based instructional approaches when teaching writing. This article describes the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) approach to teaching writing and provides examples of each step of the approach…

This article proposes that two processes are involved in the generation of content during writing: (a) an active, knowledge-constituting process in which content is synthesized by constraints within semantic memory representing the implicit structure of the writer's understanding, and (b) a reflective, knowledge-transforming process in which…

We take a look at work on writing processes by examining design processes. Design processes offer a greater emphasis on empathy with users, feedback and critique during idea generation, and varied uses of materials. After considering work already done on design and composition, we explore a variety of design processes and develop our own…

Making writing less scary for students and focusing on the messy, recursive nature of writing helps students use the writing process to bring forth the thoughts that might otherwise not find their way into essays. Students who revisit their writing also revisit their thinking and are empowered to cultivate and articulate that thinking in clearer…

The paper explains the role of oral language and dialogic interactions in the development of individual thinking and reasoning processes. Collaborative reasoning and its contribution is explained while examples are shared to illustrate ways to scaffold students' questioning, meaning making, and writing in the context of read alouds during…