Physical education is a socially constructed activity that forms one component of a wider physical culture that includes sport and health/physical activity. The terms sport and physical education are often used interchangeably in school contexts, where sport and health continue to shape what is understood by the term physical education. This study…

This article offers a rigorous and researched look at how consumer rhetorics form first-year college students' understandings about life at the university. Examined in the context of consumer culture, students' narratives about university life illustrate how they marshal, appropriate, and deploy consumerist metaphors and to what ends. Using…

Argumentation has been the emphasis of many studies during the last decade. However, previous studies have not identified why some students are more successful than others, and what are students' characteristics of argumentation, especially when working collaboratively. The purpose of this study was to identify how young students construct…

Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, a former English teacher and school counselor, is an award-winning author, best known for her children's books about the Rosebud Sioux life and culture, which combines history and legend to create culturally rich and authentic Native American stories. In this article, the authors share their conversations with Virginia…

Factors affecting the free writing speed of 11-year-old students were investigated using the Group and Individual Assessment of Handwriting Speed. Intelligence, gender, legibility and whether the student has special educational needs or speaks English as an additional language were all found to impact on writing speed to a significant extent. In…

This article shares findings from case studies of two eighteen-year-old songwriters, Bradley and James. The study investigated songwriter motivation, writing methods, and school experiences. Data was collected over the course of one year through two in-depth interviews per songwriter, two teacher interviews, and 101 songwriting artifacts. Grounded…

Children with reading difficulties often face social and emotional challenges as well. These struggles may be particularly taxing for these children as classrooms increase in diversity and they encounter fewer people like themselves. In response to these issues, we developed an approach to teaching reading called Relationally Oriented Reading…

The ability to "critically" consume entertainment media is a necessary skill for an educated and functional society--a polis; however, contemporary college students are experienced consumers of pop culture but not necessarily critical ones. Since categories of identity (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, dis/ability, culture) are…

Current traditional reflective practices in teacher preparation may be failing to address the needs of teacher candidates in terms of their identity formation as teachers. This qualitative study, utilizing a participant group of six graduate students in their student teaching internships at a small public liberal arts university, explored whether…

This dissertation is a bounded case study that examines the attitudes and perceptions of Teaching Assistants (TAs) in Composition about their TA preparation in an independent writing program at a large public research university in California. Specifically, this study focuses on TAs who were pursuing Ph.D.s in either English Literature or…

This three and a half year longitudinal study focused upon the social and cultural identities of four Italian women. In understanding and interpreting their identities, ethnographic data was analyzed through discourse and narrative analysis and presented in ways that recognized the importance of caring for their lives (Brandt, 2013), staying close…

This dissertation is a qualitative practitioner research study in which I explore how my students and I engage in critical literacy using sociopolitical Articles of the Week (AoWs). Critical literacy is the ability to read, write, and speak about texts in a reflective manner to better understand power, inequality, and injustice that prevails in…

"The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies in Literacy" brings together state-of-the-art research on literacy learning among deaf and hard of hearing learners (DHH). With contributions from experts in the field, this volume covers topics such as the importance of language and cognition, phonological or orthographic awareness, morphosyntactic…

Writing biography, as writing any historical account, "involves the use of literary techniques and is subject to aesthetic requirements in both style and structure." Narrative, common to both historical and fictional writing, is the central theoretical concept; and understanding the nature of narrative in biography--a hybrid genre that is grounded…

This article presents an interview with Deborah H. Holdstein. In this interview, Holdstein talks about her reflections on her 1984 "The Writing Instructor" ("TWI") article "Using Film to Teach Writing" for the 30th anniversary issue of the journal. She also discusses how the relationship between the disciplines of composition studies and film…