The idea behind this project created by two teachers of different age groups was that providing students with penpals would give students a real audience to write to and change their attitudes about writing. Seventh graders and college students exchanged letters and were required to send working drafts of some class assignments to each other to…

Community college students are often described as less motivated, or "turned-off," compared to other college students. This stereotype has prevented many writing instructors from trying new ways of reaching these students at a Midwest community college, the majority of whom have access to the Internet either at home or in the local…

At a Portland (Oregon) weeklong summer workshop, K-12 teachers connect with their peers, learn from professional writers, and develop skills for teaching writing. As follow-up, participants get four guest writers for weeklong classroom residencies, $400 for books, and additional meetings with fellow participants. The program has improved teaching…

Describes how the author used research booklets to be read by sixth graders, poetry books, and taking part in a city-wide writing competition with her eighth-grade students to combat a general apathy in many students' writing efforts. Suggests the projects spoke to individual interests, helped students find a purpose to write, and improved the…

Describes how the author's 6 middle school students living in a village in the Yukon, 100 miles off the road system just below the arctic circle, enthusiastically wrote stories or poems about their lives. The students shared their works via an online electronic conferencing system with students from the unimaginably different landscape of the…

Children's drawings about reading and writing have unrealized potential for helping uncover the literacy narratives students bring to school and use to make sense of reading and writing. In this article, we highlight how one boy's drawing about literacy revealed his interpretation of his school's policy on violence as a topic of writing, which…

When a University of Louisville Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) director, a team of graduate students, and an instructor designed a free summer computer camp program for disadvantaged middle schoolers, they imagined that the middle schoolers would respond to the first instruction as if the educators had restrained them in technological and…

A journalist describes her experiences teaching writing skills at a week-long, high school arts and literary festival on the Crow Reservation and discusses how relating her own story stimulated interest and how a range of activities--walks, readings, discussions, observations and short writings on odd-shaped pieces of paper--lead to final…

Describes a 20-hour training program to prepare peer tutors to work in a writing lab. Analyzes conversations, actions, and reflections of nine peer tutors during the training period. Finds that making student discovery central to tutoring and to tutor training develops effective tutors. (SR)

Describes a cross-age reading and writing program in which sixth-grade students (all average and low-average readers) were paired with kindergarten children to read and write collaboratively on a regular basis. Finds evidence from the students themselves, their parents, the teachers, and the school librarian showing how students' attitudes toward…

This article recounts the author's experiences with students in a Writing Center, and examines the troubles of traditional teaching styles that reflect the notion of a single norm of thought and experience. Asserts that prescriptive writing instruction stymies personal and scholastic development and undermines democratic learning. Contains 12…

"Wahkohtowin," a Cree word meaning kinship or the state of being related, is a fundamental concept for understanding Indigenous culture and traditional beliefs (Ermine 2001). This article describes how three researchers in western Canada incorporated this concept into a research project that compared Indigenous and non-Indigenous…

A program developed interventions for improving student writing in the areas of technique and creativity. The targeted population consisted of students in the first through fourth grades in three different school sites, all being similar upper-middle class communities, located in the suburbs of a mid-western city. The problems that some students…

Examines reasons for the resistance and resentment of many student athletes to working with writing tutors. Discusses successful intervention strategies for dealing with counter-productive behavior. Argues that the resultant learning not only enriches the athletes, but the entire academic community, since their stories are a tremendous asset for…

Generally speaking English department faculty respond very differently when reading freshman writing than when reading most other kinds of writing. Mina Shaughnessy has pointed out that "ordinary readers" try to understand what they are reading, but the writing teacher, "like a lawyer examining a client's document for all possible ambiguities and…