Perilou Goddard is a professor of psychology at Northern Kentucky University (NKU), where she teaches introductory and abnormal psychology as well as courses in writing in psychology and drug policy. She was chosen as NKU's outstanding professor in 1999. Dana S. Dunn is a professor of psychology and former chair of the Department of Psychology at…

We analyzed the content of school-aged children's responses to a countywide in-class essay assignment in which they described what they are thankful for. Accounts were written in November of 2000 (n=152) and 2001 (n=196). We identified the most prominent themes of children's gratitude as well as differences in the themes that emerged before and…

At a writers' camp, teachers and children collaboratively write and learn together during the summer. Through student writing samples, this article shows how teachers and students apply journalistic techniques of observing, note-taking, and interviewing to collect information about their local community. Teachers and children taking part in the…

A critical geographic pedagogy of writing can help students participate in public life by gaining access to the means of knowledge production. Drawing on pedagogical and composition theory, this article analyzes student papers from an introductory-level geography course to show how geography teachers can create assignments that broaden the scope…

A high school teacher has created a unit to help uninspired seniors write personal essays for college applications. Students could move away from formulas to regain their freedom and voice in writing with the help of carefully developed steps.

When writers plan a document together, they rely on gestures as well as speech and writing in constructing a common representation of their group document. This case study of a student technical writing group explores how group members used gestures to create a conversational interaction space that they then treated like a physical text that they…

Physical education has been in decline because of the mistaken belief that the body and mind are separate and thus PE does not have much to contribute to mental function (Landers, Maxwell, Butler, & Fagan, 2001). Landers et al. theorized that sports and games present opportunities to develop thinking and reasoning skills because children are…

Despite the popularity of self-published teen zines, few studies have been conducted of the adolescent girls who write and read them. Past research on teens' reading and writing shows that adolescents read and write along stereotypical or gendered lines. This study explores the out-of-school literacy practices of three adolescent girls who write…

If frequiency of e-mail distribution is any indication, college professors and administrators indeed took notice of last fall's article in the New York Times, "A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism" (Rimer 2003), on Rutgers Professor Donald L. McCabe's recent study of cheating in college and universities. Four copies of the…

This article considers a site of practice that fosters dialogic consciousness, which I suggest is necessary to teaching social justice and diversity of thought in all sites of practice, including schools. Consciousness of one's own perspective taking and the dialogism necessary to foster voice development are grounded in a growing awareness of our…

This paper reports on a decade of research into the nature of interactions between writing center tutors and native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) tutees. It explores and describes the structure of this interaction and the behaviors of NNS tutees, and of tutors when interacting with both NS and NNS tutees. It characterizes writing…

Using the World Wide Web (hereinafter the "Web") has become an increasingly viable way to source information in academic writing. However, the Web is a fundamentally different type of resource from conventional sources such as books and journals. This paper argues that there is a need among learners for a heightened critical awareness of…

The author describes his experience teaching a writing group in Martin Tennessee jail. The faces of most of the inmates showed curiosity. Each was saying not in words, but by gesture, "help make better this boring existence." The first essays the inmates wrote were about themselves and other members of their family. Some have written…

For forty years linguists have talked about idiolect and the uniqueness of individual utterances. This article explores how far these two concepts can be used to answer certain questions about the authorship of written documents--for instance how similar can two student essays be before one begins to suspect plagiarism? The article examines two…

This article describes a natural partnership between the library and Multimedia Writing and Technical Communication (MWTC) Program at Arizona State University (ASU) East linking writing and information literacy (IL) across the curriculum. This collaborative approach has resulted in revising existing courses in order to integrate IL as well as…