The teaching of writing in secondary English subjects in Australia, as in other countries including England and the United States, has become increasingly formulaic. Pedagogies including direct instruction, modelling, scaffolding, and genre-based approaches involve the implementation of formulas for writing sentences, paragraphs, and entire…

This article provides an account of a yarn between a First Nations Australian researcher and an Anglo-Celtic Australian researcher about the future of writing curriculum in subject English education, if school in its current settler-colonial form were to be abolished and completely re-imagined. Yarning is an Indigenous research method evolving…

This essay explores an English lesson I taught to a Year 9 class in which students drew upon and narrativised personal experiences. I describe and examine the literary sociability of the lesson, by which I mean the social and cultural exchanges that give shape to students' reading and writing. In doing so, I demonstrate the need for policymakers…

Exploring the realm of literacy involves understanding how graphic novels shape students' reading and writing journeys. Through scholarly research, the authors delve into the significant impact of graphic novels on education while highlighting their appeal to students through visual features and engaging storytelling. Included is a discussion of…

Language expresses our values and identities, but in educational spaces, multidialectical and multilingual students' voices are often silenced in favor of Standard English (Lockett, 2019). As writing tutors and future language arts educators, we have developed a research-based inclusive grammar curriculum and classroom-based resources to expand…

This article describes a teacher's willingness to perform an autobiographical spoken word poem in his classroom, which provided an important model for students as they composed and shared their own slam-style poems.

In 2012, head teachers responded to the proposed new Year 6 Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling test (commonly known as the SPaG or GPS test) with warnings of curriculum narrowing, teaching to tests, and misery for pupils and families. Despite head teachers' opposition to the test, seven cohorts of Year 6 pupils have now taken it. This article…

The Writing Program (WP) at Saint Louis University has striven to create a course that draws on a richer disciplinary understanding of writing and rhetoric. The standard course structure, from which instructors are asked to fashion their own syllabi, asks students to pursue a scaffolded semester-long project. As they pursue the scaffolded…

Any single artifact in a museum possesses the potential to serve as a starting point for the viewer to interpret its meaning, develop an idea, and then generate a written piece. In this article, the authors describe steps for using a photography exhibit collection as artifactual inquiry.

This statement is a response to several recent and historical exigencies that have demonstrated a need for a broader conversation about citation justice in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies. This position statement aims to encourage scholars to engage in citation justice in all areas of scholarly production, with the specific goals of:…

In this article, the author discusses composition studies by examining how incorporating "songwriting" into a first-year writing course enables students to begin expressing their own ideas/perspectives, while also developing the ability to create the concise, detailed texts associated with academic writing. The discussion offers a…

The teaching of writing is at the core of the secondary English teacher's work. There have long been contrasting ideas about the most effective approaches to supporting students as writers, and in recent years in England the evidence--from Ofsted, for example--would suggest that it is common for teachers to offer structures to scaffold students'…

Amid the ongoing tension between an authentic teaching/learning of English and the increasing encroachment of assessments, teachers might gain support for a "meaning-making" approach by dialoguing with an earlier generation of English educators who balanced "skills" and "cultural heritage" with a "personal…

In this article, the authors share what they learned from their study of writing communities, which they refer to as writing groups, during the 2017-18 school year. The authors propose a conceptual framework for writing groups that engages students in the process of designing and participating as writers with their peers. The framework emphasizes…

William Blake's poetry seeks to inspire readers to participate in the construction of an intellectual community that he calls "Jerusalem." This process remains ever incomplete and is, in a sense, incompletable, for the work of producing such a community involves "continually building & continually decaying"…