English Language and Literature Commons^™

Book Review: A Teacher's Guide To Writing Workshop Minilessons, Belinda 'Ofakihevahanoa Fotu

The Utah English Journal

Eickholdt and Vitale-Reilly's A Teacher's Guide to Writing Workshop Minilessons is a 125 page writing instructor's manual marketed for teachers of k-8 grades. Colors regale the broad cover and every page throughout, with pages sometimes devoted just to one large blocked quote and pictures of writing carpets and writers' cubbies. Every visual and tactile indicator of this book impresses the reader that this is a text meant for teachers of small children; even so, A Teacher's Guide to Writing Workshop Minilessons is a manual of writing techniques applicable to any level of writing.

Productive Disruptions: Using Commonplace Books To Resist Eurocentrism, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Program Profile 8: Chapman University: Bridging The Gap With Action Research, Ian Barnard, Matthew Goldman, Sarah K. Robblee, Natalie Salagean, Daniel Strasberger, Candice Yacono

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"In the English Department at Chapman, all graduate students are eligible to apply for positions as GTAs after they have completed a graduate seminar in teaching composition. Those who are offered and accept GTA positions take a second graduate seminar, composition pedagogy and research practicum, simultaneously with their first semester of teaching. In order to encourage GTAs to develop identities as teacher-scholars, GTAs develop IRB-approved action research projects (Buyserie; Hawkes; Hudson et al.; Souleles) as their major work in this second seminar. These action research projects allow GTAs to research a question they have about the teaching of composition, using …

Teaching Grammar: One Day At A Time, Jenny Dunn

The Utah English Journal

When I first started teaching grammar to my high school students, I had to study up every class period to make sure I was teaching things correctly. It took me several years to feel comfortable and confident in my abilities.

However, even after seven years of teaching grammar to high schoolers (and five before that teaching junior high students), there are multiple times a year when my students ask me a question I do not know the answer to. Instead of panicking, making something up, or brushing it off as an unimportant principle, I simply say, "That's a good question. …

What Matters Most: Vision Boards For Unit Planning In The English Classroom, Johnny Allred, Corinne Downs

The Utah English Journal

In his first year as a high school teacher, Johnny sat down at the computer to plan a narrative writing unit centered on the text Chasing Lincoln's Killer. He stared at a blank unit plan template for a few minutes while crickets chirped loudly in his head-he had no idea where to begin! Sure, he was a first year teacher, but he had been well-trained in the art of lesson and unit-planning, and he was confident in his ability to teach. Why was this so difficult? What skills and knowledge really mattered for his students? What assessments could he develop …

Book Review: A Snake Falls To Earth, Heidi Stone

The Utah English Journal

Nina, a Lipan girl from Earth, and Oli, a Cottonmouth Snake from the Reflection World, are drawn together to save those who they love the most. Little Badger utilizes traditional Lipan Apache storytelling techniques to draw the reader into the stories of the animal people, monsters, and the importance of family.

Book Review: Kaleidoscope, Justin Scholes

The Utah English Journal

Characteristic of his award-winning style, Brian Selznick's newest book, Kaleidoscope (2021) blends text and beautiful pencil drawings that push readers to consider meaning in words and images. The book features twenty-four short stories, and as the title suggests, each story is a glimpse into a world, a life, a perspective.

Book Review: Ophelia After All, Madison Simpson

The Utah English Journal

Ophelia Rojas has always been the girl who is obsessed with boys. As a senior in high school, she can't remember a time when she wasn't crushing on a cute boy or dreaming of a perfect prom night. Ophelia is also curating her perfect garden as she dreams of studying botany at university, much to her English professor mother's chagrin. When Ophelia starts developing an unexpected crush, she begins to rethink everything she thought she knew about herself.

Book Review: The Girl From The Sea, Austin Andruski

The Utah English Journal

The Girl from the Sea, a graphic novel by Molly Knox Ostertag, is an emotionally rejuvenating tale of young love and self-identity. For Morgan, she wants nothing more than to fit in until she can graduate from high school and leave her island home, finally able to be herself away from people who might judge her.

Trading Spaces: Space As Metaphor For Contingency In Writing Centers, Genie N. Giaimo

The Writing Center Journal

This article offers a critical reading of writing center workplace space. Weaving together counterstorying with semiotic, geographic, and rhetorical analysis of space, the author provides an alternative way of understanding the connections between our physical and metaphorical workspaces. Precarity and contingency, the article posits, are made more palpable through connection to physical space because writing center labor (and workers) are often identified mostly through their space and availability. Ultimately, this article argues for a new way forward that decouples writing center workers and labor from inhabited workplace space. Arguing that these spaces are gendered, classed, and raced (among other things), …

The Paradoxes Of Contingency: Stories Of Contingent Professional Tutors’ Lived Experiences, Beth Sabo, Kaia-Marie A. Bishop, Kristine M. Gatchel, Rachel Dick

The Writing Center Journal

Despite comprising the majority of labor in higher education in general and writing centers more specifically, contingent workers’ voices and experiences have often been overlooked. The contingent voices that have been represented have predominantly been those in director or administrative positions, not the professional tutors who engage in centers’ day-to-day consulting. This lack of representation in the literature perpetuates institutional inequities and belies a larger paradox: that contingent workers attempting to ameliorate the precarity of their situation may jeopardize their livelihood. Because contingent workers’ identities and roles have historically been ignored and marginalized, few research and publication options are available …

Writing Young Adult Fiction: Reflections On Narration And Theme In Young Adult Literature, Kimberly Davidson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to Young Adult Library Services, “Young Adult Literature is a genre that is separate from Children's Literature. It emerged in the twentieth century when teenagers became a powerful force of the economy in the 1930s and gained prominence in the sixties.” Various sources list common elements that make YA literature a distinct category. 1) YA books appeal to the interests of readers from ages twelve to eighteen. 2) YA books typically explore a teenage character’s entry into an unfamiliar “world.” 3) YA books usually feature a protagonist’s self-reflection on events that influence their forays into the adult world. 4) …

Engl 6360 - Descriptive Linguistics For Teachers, Ramsés Ortín

Open Educational Resources - Books

No abstract provided.

New Possibilities For The Esl Classroom: Toward An Appreciation Of Creative Writing, Alyssa A. Jewell

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

This article addresses the gap between ESL and creative writing in college-level ESL writing courses. In ESL classrooms, creative writing activities may be implemented sporadically, but rarely, if ever, prove part of a standard, long-term curriculum. However, the benefits of utilizing creative writing in ESL classrooms are manifold. Highlighted here are various short-term studies and personal accounts that examine smaller creative writing assignments used in college ESL classroom settings. Gloria Anzaldúa has provided a philosophical rationale and springboard for engaging in this pedagogy and its potential wider applications, especially through her bi-lingual approach to creative scholarship. Felicia Rose Chavez’s anti-racist …

Teaching Dystopia In Dystopian Realities: Trauma-Informed Pedagogy And The Dystopian Novel After Covid-19, Emily Rose Lavrador

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project advocates for a trauma-informed approach when teaching dystopian literature, particularly those with plague or pandemic plots. To have a truly student-centered approach in the classroom, trauma-informed pedagogy is necessary for students not only to learn comfortably, but to actively be creative or retain information.

Dystopian literature is assigned and consumed at pervasive rates; this popularity calls for additional attention to its teaching. The survey data presented in this project shows that 68 of 100 students had been assigned one or more dystopian texts through school years 2020 onwards, and 72 additionally were seeking out the dystopian genre on …

Doing The Work -- Collectively Pursuing Anti-Racist And Equitable Teaching: One High School English Department’S Journey, Sharon Murchie, Anthony Andrus, Pat Brennan, Gina Farnelli, Shelby Fletcher, Dawn Reed, Emily Solomon, Benjamin K. Woodcock

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Our district has long been heralded as a beacon school, one that delivers exceptional education in an exceptional community. Peeling back the layers, however, revealed a district that lurched towards the traditional, even with the hiring of DEI faculty and the step away from an historical indigenous mascot. In a time where teachers are exhausted and afraid of community backlash, our

English department dared to tear off the scabs of old wounds and united to push toward what is best for our changing community and students. Hard conversations, difficult topics, and months of legwork at last successfully provided the impetus …

Engaging Students And Teaching Life Skills Through Community Collaboration, Kim Stein

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Collaboration with the Youth First Program of Saginaw increased students' engagement in eleventh-grade English. Students bonded with community partners, their teacher, and their peers in new ways which produced an environment of mutual respect and deeper learning. Students engaged in a debate project which garnered recognition from school administrators and community members, who were influenced to enact positive changes for the school community.

Reading Utopian Pedagogies: Discovering The Practical Here And Now Of Utopian Thinking, Carter Johnke

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis offers a way of reading texts for their utopian aims, a term I use to analyze utopian themes and ideas in a text while keeping the focus on practicality. Reading a text for its utopian aims discovers what a text hopes for but always reflects on how those hopes serve the here and now of the author and the reader. The idealistic conclusions of utopian thinking, the utopian visions, only play a role in the utopian aim. This project does not promote the ultimate or extreme ends of utopian visions; instead, it analyzes the educational effects of entertaining …

Back Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Back matter for WCJ 41.1.

Contingency As A Barrier To Decolonial Engagement: Listening To Multilingual Writers, Grace Lee-Amuzie

The Writing Center Journal

Based on the concept of transformative listening by García (2017) that views listening as a form of decolonial work that must take place in writing centers, the article examines colonial thinking and contingency as toxic preexisting conditions of writing center ecology that hinder our ability to listen to marginalized multilingual voices. Recognizing the commonality between multilingualism and contingency, both as ignored marginalized intersecting identities in the hierarchy of the racialized and corporatized university system, the article describes the complexity of engaging contingent workers in decolonial work and listening. Further, it argues that contingency creates significant barriers to the type of …

Front Matter

The Writing Center Journal

Front matter for Writing Center Journal 41.1.

Queer Contingency In Writing Center Administrative Work, Patrick Greene, Travis Webster

The Writing Center Journal

Using a sprinkle of Queer Theory, their on-the-job experiences, and writing center scholarship that challenges disciplinary orthodoxies, two intersectionally queer and contingent writing center researcher-administrators examine the constraints of contingency; discuss the underlife of queer labor; and point to queer labor nuances and possibilities alongside contingent writing center work.

Writing Tutor Alumni Takeaways: Pros And Cons Of Contingency, Glenn Hutchinson, Xuan Jiang, Mario Avalos

The Writing Center Journal

This essay aims to build upon the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP), designed by Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail (2010), which focuses on what tutors learn about themselves as writers and students. However, the PWTARP survey, like much of writing center scholarship, focuses on student workers attending PWIs (Predominately White Institutions). To help fill the diversity gap in the existing literature, the current study uses the PWTARP survey as a frame of reference to investigate what tutors learned about themselves as writers and students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Based on feedback from a team of …

Comfort, Contingency, And Writing Center Work: An Essay In Three Illusions, Loren Maria Guay

The Writing Center Journal

In this hybrid essay, I engage creatively with the illusory nature of contingent work, presenting three episodes from my personal experiences as a contingent writing program administrator (WPA) during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, I interrogate these experiences by building on past critiques of “comfortable” writing centers, applying Sara Ahmed’s work on the affectiveness of (dis)comfort in order to examine comfort and its uneasy relationship with labor. For whom is the writing center expected to labor to provide comfort? Whose comfort, and moreover whose safety, is jeopardized or made invisible in the process? In answering these questions, this …

One Last Month, Or Clancy's Time-Box, Safiyya Bintali

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

One Last Month is a young adult (YA) novella of roughly forty-three thousand words aimed at readers in middle school and in early high school grades. Structurally, it is an “ensemble Bildungsroman”, wherein all the main characters—rather than just one—embark on journeys of emotional growth and are given significant plot focus. Through the characters, One Last Month focuses on the importance and influence of non-romantic love, specifically through homosocial relationships between the novella’s male characters. It also touches on the process of grief beyond the Kübler-Ross structure and, though more subtly, emotional expression in young men. Through one of the …

A Tool For Digital Bibliotherapy: Fostering Emotional Resiliency Through A Visual Novel, Joy Cooper

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Suicide rates among children have risen over the last three years. In Clark County specifically, the numbers doubled between 2019 and 2021. The research for this project sought to find the benefits of bibliotherapy and create a tool to be used for early intervention in children displaying signs of developmental emotional and behavioral concerns. Additionally, the research focused on determining the benefits of bibliotherapy across various mediums with a particular aim on the accessibility of digital formats. The research concluded that bibliotherapy in a digital format is not only beneficial but has a tendency to produce higher engagement among children. …

Process Interviews, Joe Anson

The Utah English Journal

In an attempt to have the students care more about how they could improve their writing, I decided to focus on the writing process as opposed to the final product. And because students start with varying shades of writing aptitude, I felt it important that all the writers in my classroom be given the chance to earn a high grade as we focused on improving writing, not writing perfectly.

Using Inquiry To Drive Revision, Mercedes Allen

The Utah English Journal

When an object needs motion, it needs something to cause movement, to drive it. A car needs gasoline. A kite needs wind. A runner needs nutrient rich food and plenty of water. Just like these things need a substance or force to keep them going, students need something to fuel them as they go through the writing process. While it would be much simpler for us to give students crackers or suckers to fix a student with writer's block, there is something else we can implement into our classrooms daily to give our students the power to continue to move …

Book Review: Ain't Burned All The Bright, Rachel Billings

The Utah English Journal

Ain't Burned All the Bright captures the anxieties, fears, and tensions of 2020 clearly and vividly even though it consists of only three long sentences. Jason Reynolds tells the story of a Black boy and his family during the Covid-19 quarantine and pandemic. Through the prose of Reynolds and illustrations of Jason Griffin, the reader learns what the pandemic was like from the point of view of a typical teenager.

An Incomplete Success, Elva Shule Escobedo

The Utah English Journal

Once, I wrote a letter to my US senator, a request from my older brother who had left the country voluntarily just a few months before. In the letter, I explained my brother's complicated situation with his legal status and pleaded for his case. This letter became the catalyst for a writing assignment in my classroom. Students wanted to write their own letters and pleas to government officials, too, explaining their different family members' situations in hopes that their letters would make a difference. And so, they set out to write. They wrote like I had never seen them write. …