Current research suggests that students who struggle with grammar, spelling, mechanics and other "problems of ability," as well as students who suffer from "problems of engagement," as well as those students who see reading and writing as a chore, can benefit from creative writing assignments and learn to enjoy reading and…

In literature, composition, and other areas of English Studies, relateability can be an important tool to inscribe marginalized subjects as academic citizens. However, its larger arc reproduces ethnocentric and individualistic ideologies at the national and personal levels that foreclose the true understanding of and engagement with Otherness that…

This essay has been one of the hardest professionally to write as it documents some very personal and professional soul-searching that involved myself, many of my colleagues, and the students in our department over the span of four years. When I first presented our initial reform attempts at the 2010 CEA in San Antonio, much of this paper was…

If I can show my literature students how Nabokov can take them from familiar representations of experience to representations of less familiar experiences, from a knowledge of the given world to an understanding of the world of the imagination, then, it seems to me, I ought to be able find some way of showing my composition students how to do it…

I propose that we think about what a paragraph is by considering its "function," what it does in a piece of writing, whether in a popular novel, a newspaper article, an e-mail, a business report, or a lofty piece of literary criticism. We might think about a paragraph as a "rhetorical dwelling."

In this article, I demonstrate how the use of reflective writing assignments in first-year composition facilitated students' understanding of their own writing process strategies. I first discuss the theoretical roots from which reflective practice among student writers grows. Next, I employ my students' voices to demonstrate that reflection…

Integrating writing instruction into the content-area classroom poses a variety of challenges for instructors at all levels. Beyond the need to embrace a new skill set involving writing instruction, there is the resistance of students (and faculty) who find a disconnection between content-area and literacy learning. Developing a method for…

For my purposes, I approach writing assessment as more than just grading or responding to a set of student papers within a classroom context. Instead, I look at writing assessment as a complex act that links to teaching and learning, that affects the educational environment and students, that acknowledges the consequences of the assessment, and…

The pedagogical principle of experiential learning embodied in the oral interpretation of literature through Readers' Theater provides an avenue to accomplish a seemingly daunting task. Students' participation in reading, interpreting, discussing, writing, assessing, and performing their own creative responses to a literary work promotes a…

The historical transition from the 20th Century to the 21st has sparked a boom in identifying names and classifying characteristics of the young American adults and teens coming of age at that time. Though there is much discrepancy about the starting birth year and the life span parameters of "Generation Y", generalizing descriptions abound in an…

This article reports on a challenging and effective assignment on thinking in a discipline that the author gave during fall 2006 in his sophomore-level "Critical Reading, Thinking, and Writing" (CRTW) course at Winthrop University. Required of all students, the course follows Writing 101: Composition; and a multi-disciplinary course…

Having celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2005, the Advanced Placement (AP) program has received quite a bit of attention in the past few years due mainly to its exponential growth in popularity. While much of this attention has been positive, a significant amount of criticism has attacked the assumptions of the AP program, aligning it with…