Education Commons^™

On Parallel Paths: Learning Through Case Studies In The Writing Pedagogy Course, Alyssa Devey, Christina Saidy, Mohammed S. Iddrisu, Seher Shah, Marlene A. Tovar

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article reports on a case study project assigned in a writing pedagogy course. The authors, four graduate teaching assistants and their professor, share their case study questions, experiences, and challenges. Via the case study assignment, the TAs identified parallel experiences they shared with their students. Recognizing parallel paths helps first-year TAs reflect on their experiences as teachers and learners, build connections with students, and develop sustainable teaching practices beyond the first year. The authors share strategies for identifying parallel paths and encourage TA educators to incorporate them into the writing pedagogy course.

Writing Without Audiences: A Comprehensive Survey Of State-Mandated Standards And Assessments, James E. Warren

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Writing studies professionals agree that students must learn to write for specific audiences. Despite this professional consensus, there is reason to believe that this skill is not widely tested in state-mandated writing assessments. In this study, we survey the state content standards for English Language Arts and the state-mandated writing tests for high school students in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. While all states have adopted standards that require students to write for specific audiences, only a small percentage test this skill on state-mandated assessments. We argue that the consequences of this misalignment between standards and assessment …

A Reflection On Writing Methods: Where Am I Going? Where Have I Been?, Kia Jane Richmond

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

The author, an eminent scholar and practitioner of writing teaching methods, reflects on the growth and development of the community and scholarship of writing teacher education and highlights several key trends as discussed in this issue.

Teaching Priorities As Both Durable And Flexible: Writing Pedagogy Classes Across International Contexts, Charlotte L. Land, Jessica Cira Rubin

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article developed from a year-long inquiry into our practices as writing teacher educators. As new university faculty in two different countries, we drew on a previous literature review project to identify enduring priorities for teaching writing pedagogy. We then analyzed our developing practices in these unfamiliar places, specifically noting what also felt flexible enough to work across contexts, leaving space for local adaptation. For each of our classes, we explore how we expressed those priorities: discussing teaching practices as connected with theories and discourses of teaching writing, supporting teacher-student experiences through a cycle of writing, and facilitating appreciative views …

Writing Methods Key In Preparing Hope-Focused Teacher-Writers And Teachers Of Writing, Nicole Sieben

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This manuscript emphasizes the need for positioning students (preservice and inservice teachers) in methods courses as both teacher-writers and teachers of writing. It demonstrates the importance of teaching writing methods with a hope-focused, process-driven approach grounded in social justice reasoning and includes ways of positioning students in methods courses as teacher-writers with valued professional presence in the field of English education. By way of example, the piece includes a description of a specific “Professional Writings” assignment from a methods course for pre- and inservice teachers and models the value of choice and voice for writers at all levels. It then …

The Evolution From Mentor Texts To Critical Mentor Text Sets, Margaret O. Opatz, Elizabeth T. Nelson

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article chronicles how two teacher educators changed the mentor text set assignment--one component of a larger writing unit plan--from a simple list of texts to a critical mentor text set that includes intentionally selected, culturally and linguistically diverse texts. The goal of the critical mentor text set was to support preservice teachers’ understanding of how to implement culturally sustaining writing pedagogy through developing students’ identities, skills, and intellect as writers, and students’ abilities to read texts through a critical stance that evaluates the privilege and power within the texts while working towards anti-oppression.

Humanizing The Teaching Of Writing By Centering The Writer, Naitnaphit Limlamai

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

In this work, the author explains how she prepared preservice secondary teachers to consider themselves as writers and to teach writing in more humanizing ways. She first describes how preservice teachers were guided to cultivate identities as writers and broaden ideas of “writing.” With new knowledge about themselves as they developed writerly identities, they surfaced and unpacked existing ideas about learning how to write and built knowledge about teaching writing, creating teaching artifacts like unit and lesson plans, interacting with local adolescent writers in pen pal letters, and participating in simulated feedback sessions with adolescent writers. Asking preservice teachers to …

Teaching Writing As A Metacognitive Process, Heather Fox

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

In a writing methods course for future K-12 educators, preservice teachers examine the intersections of their experiences as writers, students, and future teachers through three interdependent projects. Completed between Fall 2019 and Spring 2022, this empirical study (n=138) includes Elementary Education, Middle Education, and (Secondary) English Teaching majors and focuses on the first project, Writing Memory, to examine how teaching writing as a metacognitive process facilitates preservice teachers’ understanding of how they and their future students developed, and are continuing to develop, as writers. The project analyzes students’ reflections on how they select and arrange previously written text to …

Variations On A Writing Methods Course: Two English Educators Across Four Decades, Amber Jensen, Deborah Dean

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article draws on the intersecting autoethnographies of two writing methods instructors over the course of nearly 40 years as undergraduate students, secondary English teachers, and English educators to map the evolution of the undergraduate writing methods course at Brigham Young University (BYU). It identifies five foundational principles that have shaped the course curriculum, learning activities, and assessment, integrating artifacts and student examples to demonstrate the way they enact these principles with the preservice teachers in their classes. The authors conclude by identifying revisions and future directions for the course in its coming years.

On Writing Teacher Education, The Writing ‘Methods’ Course, And The Evolution Of A Community, Jonathan E. Bush, Erinn Bentley

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

Building Community In An Asynchronous Write-To-Learn Course, Mary K. Tedrow

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This study examines one online asynchronous course, Writing in Literature, devised by the researcher to determine the potential for building a student-centered course functioning as a learning community in spite of the limitations of the lack of shared space or time. The course was examined via student surveys that qualified experiences within the course as well as a review and coding of end-of-course student reflections. The survey and reflective commentary indicate that it is possible for an asynchronous course to effectively build a vibrant learning community. The learner to learner, learner to instructor, and learner to content framework recommended …

The Editor's Page, George F. Estey

Perspectives (1969-1979)

Editor's Page for Interdisciplinary Perspectives Vol. 10 No. 1

Interdisciplinary Perspectives Vol. 10 No. 1

Perspectives (1969-1979)

No abstract provided.

The Liberating Function Of Philosophy In Education, Leonard M. Fleck

Perspectives (1969-1979)

"But wherever ideas are effective, there is freedom"¹

The primary intent of this paper is not to advance or defend any novel philosophical theses. Rather, the purpose is to provide what I will call a "philosophic service" for undergraduate teachers of philosophy. More specifically, I am concerned both with the continued decline of interest in the liberal arts (philosophy in particular) among undergraduates and with the apparent inability of many teachers of the liberal arts to articulate satisfactorily a rationale for the pursuit of the liberal arts. In this paper I cannot analyze all the complex economic and socio-cultural …

Some Thoughts On Interdisciplinary Studies, Sidney F. Parham, Peter W. Graham

Perspectives (1969-1979)

The vogue for interdisciplinary courses has led our more crusty and conservative colleagues to complain that such programs represent a mere repackaging of traditional courses, a process that diminishes the value the student receives from traditional courses without broadening or integrating his knowledge. Too often this criticism is just. We should like to argue that a genuinely interdisciplinary approach does not repackage but restructures knowledge in such a way that students are led to consider the nature of knowledge itself and thus, we hope, to think about their own thinking. Such reflection seems to us a decidedly traditional goal of …

Aesthetic Game-Rules For The Arts In General Education, Gary R. Sudano

Perspectives (1969-1979)

Aesthetics is commonly known as the philosophical study of the nature and function of art. As such, it is considered to be a theoretical enterprise of interest to some philosophers and, perhaps, to some arts historians. But, as such, it is not thought to have a great deal of relevance or usefulness to teachers and students in general education arts courses. That this is not the case is the first point of this paper. The second point is that while aesthetics is sometimes a weary and cumbersome subject, there are several important principles to be gleaned from its literature which …

Humanistic Biology: A General Education Approach, Alwynelle S. Ahl, Lawrence R. Krupka, Helen B. Hiscoe, Andrew Mcclary

Perspectives (1969-1979)

Editor's Note: The following articles are printed here as they should have appeared in Volume 9, Number 3. My apologies have already gone to the authors. I now extend them to our patient readers. Both printer and compositor assure me that such errors as appeared earlier will not happen again.

Introduction

In modern man's attempt to understand human nature, two major modes of perceiving human experience, the humanistic and scientific, have often been in conflict. C.P. Snow labelled this dichotomy "the two cultures." As the power of science and accompanying technology have grown in the past forty years, the distance …

The Editor's Page, George F. Estey

Perspectives (1969-1979)

Editor's Page for Interdisciplinary Perspective Vol. 10 No. 2 & 3

Interdisciplinary Perspectives Vol. 10 No. 2 & 3

Perspectives (1969-1979)

No abstract provided.

Moving A Liberal Education Program From Adoption To Implementation: New Forces And New Issues, L. Jackson Newell

Perspectives (1969-1979)

At the Boston meeting of the Association of General and Liberal Studies in 1976, I had the privilege of reporting on the two-year process by which the University of Utah assessed its general education program, planned major revisions in it, and saw them adopted by the University Senate. It is now my task to report on the less glamorous, but probably more crucial, process by which a formally adopted program is implemented. The research of John Pratt and Tyrrell Burgess,¹ which has assessed major educational policy changes in Great Britain , suggests that scholars and educational policy makers generally …

Perceptions Of College And The Pursuit Of Liberal Education, Victor L. Worsfold

Perspectives (1969-1979)

In their recent book, Revolving College Doors,² Robert G. Cope and William Hannah have argued that "it is the fit between student and college that accounts for most of the transferring, stopping out and dropping out"³ amongst our present student body. This idea when taken to be correct, gives the lie to what is usually averred to explain the rapidly increasing phenomenon of attrition amongst those wishing to attend college, namely, financial stringency. Cope and Hannah would have us believe that "lack of money is a socially acceptable reason to discontinue attending school regardless of actual financial …

A Program For The Development Of Liberal Studies In Science, James L. Goatley

Perspectives (1969-1979)

Most academic disciplines have a clear relationship between the research that is done and the content of courses that are taught. In the area of general education and liberal studies, however, the reciprocal relationships between teaching and scholarly investigation are much less well understood. On this paper general education refers to courses that are taught and liberal studies to the scholarship related to this course work.) The author believes that there is difficulty because the domains of general education and related liberal studies have been poorly articulated. The problem is particularly acute in general education and liberal studies in science. …

"Liberal Arts; Past, Present And Future", Dwight L. Ling

Perspectives (1969-1979)

The Greek poet Pindar stated that the wise man is one who knows by nature, while those who know merely because they have been taught are to be scorned. The suggestion that there is intuitive knowledge or an elevated type of common sense is not new; however, I would argue that we must study and ponder the wisdom of the past if we would be wise today or in the future. Many liberal arts colleges have detracted from this wisdom by dropping classical studies and catering to the whims of an ahistorical generation of students. To gain the insights that …

Tapping The Potentials Of Interdisciplinary Studies In A Freshman Core Program, William A. Sadler Jr.

Perspectives (1969-1979)

This article will discuss an innovative Interdisciplinary Freshman Core Program that has been developing for five years at a small liberal arts college in the New York metropolitan area. The significance of this program extends beyond the campus of Bloomfield College, for it exemplifies one way to meet productively some of the serious issues now confronting higher education across the country. Before examining this program, let me introduce you to this College in terms of its precarious position at the start of its second hundred years of existence.

Lifelong Learning And The World Of Work, Ivan Charner

Perspectives (1969-1979)

This editorial answers three basic questions about the relief education program. Why the program is important?, how the program operates? and who participates in the program? A similar editorial could be written today about the growing number of learning opportunities available to workers and the growing number of participants in such programs. This essay represents such an effort. Although in more breadth and in more detail than the 1933 editorial, I will focus on the same basic questions. First, why should lifelong learning for workers be advanced? Second, how have opportunities for learning been made available to working adults? and …

General Education And Interdisciplinary Studies In The Arts, Dennis J. Sporre

Perspectives (1969-1979)

The conservatory approach to education in the arts is commonplace. Even in land-grant institutions which purportedly espouse a liberal arts or general education (there are differences between the two) the tendency in arts instruction has been to shape the curriculum into more and more specificity, so that even at the undergraduate level the student is given an option to choose, within his major, rather narrow specializations. The resultant increase in specialty courses and their need for staffing constantly refires the age-old arguments relating to general and liberal education and how, within various matrixes, general students or non-majors can be accommodated. …

Some Thoughts On Interdisciplinary Studies, Sidney F. Parham, Peter W. Graham

Perspectives (1969-1979)

The vogue for interdisciplinary courses has led our more crusty and conservative colleagues to complain that such programs represent a mere repackaging of traditional courses, a process that diminishes the value the student receives from traditional courses without broadening or integrating his knowledge. Too often this criticism is just. We should like to argue that a genuinely interdisciplinary approach does not repackage but restructures knowledge in such a way that students are led to consider the nature of knowledge itself and thus, we hope, to think about their own thinking. Such reflection seems to us a decidely traditional goal of …

Interdisciplinary Perspectives Vol. 9 No. 3

Perspectives (1969-1979)

No abstract provided.

The Editor's Page, George F. Estey

Perspectives (1969-1979)

Editor's Page for Interdisciplinary Perspective