Resource Topics
Teaching Writing - Writing in the Community
A Moment of Understanding: Getting on the Bus of Justice
April 2008
Jan M. Sabin
In this chapter from Writing Intention: Prompting Professional Learning through Student Work, Jan Sabin, who is with the Upper Peninsula Writing Project, demonstrates how she pushes her second graders to write about social justice issues by focusing on familiar things like the cafeteria, the playground, and their homes.
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Utah Writing Project Creates Writing Group for Veterans
August 2008
The Wasatch Range Writing Project (Utah) reached out into the community with a writing workshop for veterans that has produced poignant and therapeutic writing. The workshop could expand and serve as good training for teacher–consultants.
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“I’m a Writer Now!” The Who, Where, and When of an ELL Newspaper
The Quarterly,
2005
Joe Bellino
Bellino, a teacher of English language learners, describes the process of publishing a newspaper written by his students and talks about how this paper has positively affected readers, writers, and the school.
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Voces del Corazón: Voices from the Heart
The Quarterly,
2005
Dolores S. Perez
NWP Project Outreach member Dolores Perez was committed to facilitating, in her low-income community, the project's goals of "access, relevance, and diversity." Her pursuit of these goals led to Family Literacy Night.
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Writing Outside the Bars: A Journey of Self-Discovery
The Quarterly,
2005
Maureen Geraghty, Jevon Jackson
Geraghty came to know Jackson, a convicted murderer at age sixteen, when she taught him in a juvenile detention center. Their writing exchange documents the power of writing in even the most desperate situations.
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I Can't See You, But I Know You: An Intergenerational Literacy Program
The Quarterly,
2004
Anne DiPardo, Pat Schnack
The authors describe an intergenerational literacy program between senior-citizen volunteers and eighth-graders engaged in joint literacy activities.
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No More Fear and Loathing: The Family Writing Project in Las Vegas
The Quarterly,
2004
Arthur Kelly
Kelly, who created a family writing project to involve busy parents in their children's education, answers questions about starting a family writing project and describes activities he uses to get families writing together.
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The Family Writing Project Builds a Learning Community in Connecticut
The Quarterly,
2004
Valerie Diane Bolling
Connecticut teacher Bolling describes how, through NWP's Project Outreach, she learned of the Family Writing Project in Nevada and used this structure to help her school strengthen literacy and increase parent involvement.
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Am I an Educator?
The Quarterly,
2003
Jennie Fleming
In recent years, the National Writing Project has developed a collaborative relationship with the Centre for Social Action (CSA), a rights-based organization in England that works with communities to create change. As a member of the CSA team, Jennie Fleming has been intimately involved in these collaborative efforts—a journey, of sorts, exploring the nature of education and learning. As a result, she has found herself on a parallel personal journey exploring the same issue and, specifically, her role as an educator.
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Book Review: Reinventing English: Teaching in the Contact Zone, by John Gaughan
The Quarterly,
Winter 2003
Jack Caswell
Jack Caswell reviews Reinventing English: Teaching in the Contact Zone by John Gaughan.
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Book Review: School's Out! by Glynda Hull and Katherine Schultz
The Quarterly,
Spring 2003
Monie Hayes
Hayes find this book's greatest strength to be the "solid attention it gives to the growing body of research into out-of-school literacies and their relationship to scholastic goals."
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How Our Assumptions Affect Our Expectations
The Quarterly,
Spring 2003
Jan Hillskemper
Hillskemper reminds us that teachers can drift into a set of misguided assumptions when they mistakenly believe that parents have the same values and expectations as they do.
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San Diego Team Pegged for Moffett Award
The Voice,
March-April 2003
Art Peterson
Elementaryschool teachers Kim Douillard, Jan Hamilton, and Danan McNamara of the San Diego Area Writing Project are recipients of the 2002 James Moffett Memorial Award. The teachers developed action-research projects that reflect the spirit of Moffett's work, including an ethnography project involving disposable cameras that encouraged children to record and then reflect on what they saw.
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The Spirit of Volunteerism in English Composition
The Quarterly,
Spring 2003
Jim Wilcox
Wilcox links writing in a variety of genres to the social awareness program that is at the core of his college English class.
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Some People Are Brave
The Voice,
September-October 2002
Carl Nagin
Before the September 11 attacks, Dawn Imamoto's second-grade class had been working on a unit on bravery, which she then used to help her students create their own publication based on their understanding of bravery in the context of the events of September 11, 2001.
Essay Makes Real-World
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The Writing on the Walls
The Voice,
May-June 2002
Jackie Wesson
Looking for a way to involve the community in their literacy efforts, Jackie Wesson describes how the Mobile Bay Writing Project developed The Writing on the Walls, a weeklong writing fair that celebrates literacy.
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Writing to Build Community in a Time of Stress
The Voice,
September-October 2002
Sarah Robbins
Sarah Robbins describes the work of the program Keeping and Creating American Communities (KCAC), and the writing assignments that a group of middle and high school teachers developed after September 11.
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Youth Dreamers Put Social Action Principles to Work
The Voice,
March-April 2002
Art Peterson
A group of students in Baltimore are working hard toward their ambitious goal of buying a house to serve as a community center for their neighborhood.
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“Let's Talk”: Building a Bridge Between Home and School
The Quarterly,
Summer 2001
Catherine Humphrey
High school teacher Catherine Humphrey describes what happened when she began asking students to discuss classroom ideas at home, and offers some tips for promoting quality verbal interaction.
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Moffett Award Winner Unites Third-Graders, Senior Citizens
The Voice,
November-December 2001
Andy Bradshaw
A Seattle-area program developed by Moffett award winner Diane Babcock brought third-graders and senior citizens together to construct a rich narrative of the past.
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Promoting Social Imagination Through Interior Monologues
The Quarterly,
Winter 2001
Bill Bigelow, Linda Christensen
The authors demonstrate how the interior monologue form provides students with opportunities to think about why others do what they do and why they think as they think.
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Undrowning: A Rediscovery of the Power of Student Voice
The Voice,
January-February 2001
Nannette Overley
Attending an NWP–sponsored Centre for Social Action meeting, Overley, a teacher at an alternative school in Santa Cruz, California, realizes that her best teaching has resulted from following a process similar to CSA's.
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Parent Homework Bridges the Teacher-Student Gap
The Voice,
January-February 2000
Mary Buckelew
Mary Buckelew uses parent homework to personally connect with her students and their families.
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The Other Side of the Stone: Student Conversations with a Graveyard
The Quarterly,
Summer 2000
Patrick C. Pritchard
Patrick C. Pritchard, a teacher at an alternative school for adolescent boys, uses a cemetery as source material for writing and learning.
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Wall of Literacy Learning Exemplifies Student Writing
The Voice,
January-February 2000
Lynne Alvine
Members of the Rural Voices team and the site directors from the Southcentral Pennsylvania Writing Project create a "wall of literacy" which exemplifies students' writing development across the age ranges.
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From Grief, Poetry: Expressive Writings from the Westside Tragedy
The Quarterly,
Winter 1999
Robert Lamm
In the context of a trauma that followed a massacre at an Arkansas middle school, Lamm makes a case for the power of poetry writing as therapy in times of crisis.
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Partial Successes and Limited Failures: Recognizing the Dissonances in our Teacherly Talk
The Quarterly,
Spring 1999
Jane Greer
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They Will Choose to Learn: An Alternative to the Lock-Step Classroom
The Quarterly,
Spring 1999
Jon Appleby
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You and Me and a Book Makes Three: Students Write Collaborative Book Reviews
The Quarterly,
Summer 1999
Bernadette Lambert
Lambert describes a project in which students and parents share and write about the same book.
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Book Review: The Art of Workplace English: A Curriculum for All Students, by C. Boiarsky
The Quarterly,
Summer 1998
Ann Dobie
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Book Review: You Can Make a Difference, by Keresty, O'Leary and Wortley
The Quarterly,
Fall 1998
Elyse Eidman-Aadahl
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Do You Remember Me? Writing Oral Histories with Nursing Home Residents
The Quarterly,
Summer 1998
Cathie English
High school teacher Cathie English describes how students collected rich oral histories and created "Elderly Voices: Living Links to the Past," a online collection of narratives of nursing home residents in Hamilton County, Nebraska.
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In the Midst of Silence
The Quarterly,
Spring 1998
Kimberly Sloan
Working as a volunteer in a youth correctional facility, Sloan details her struggle to develop a curriculum that would allow her students "to find an overlap between school and their world."
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Against All Odds: Implementing a Middle School Writing Club
The Quarterly,
Spring 1997
Nancy Renko, Mary Weaver
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Book Excerpt: Until We Are Strong Together: Women Writers in the Tenderloin, by C. Heller
The Quarterly,
Fall 1997
Caroline Heller
Heller re–creates the process of a writing workshop in San Francisco's Tenderloin, a neighborhood of the poor and homeless, illustrating how writing serves as a fulcrum for explorations of—and actions upon—the forces underlying the participants' lives.
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Sounding Board: The Writing Teacher as Confidant
The Quarterly,
Spring 1997
Coleen Armstrong
Armstrong sees her job not just as correcting grammar and spelling but also as reassuring students, offering support, and providing a safe sounding board for them.
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The "Righting" Club: Travails and Triumphs of a Community Writing Workshop
The Quarterly,
Spring 1997
Michael Larkin
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The Writing Process Goes to San Quentin
The Quarterly,
Fall 1997
Jane Juska
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We Are No Stephen Kings: The Reluctant Road from Coal Miner to Classoom
The Quarterly,
Summer 1997
Aida Mainella Everhart
Teaching a "transition class" to a group of unemployed coal miners, Everhart finds that reading, writing, and writing poetry in particular prepare and motivate her students for the challenges that lie ahead.
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Literacy and Numeracy in a Changing Workplace
The Quarterly,
Spring 1996
Mark Jury, Mira Katz
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Real World Feminism: A Teacher Learns from Her Students' Writing
The Quarterly,
Summer 1996
Lisa Orta
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Stories Out of School: First-Grade Family Journals
The Quarterly,
Winter 1996
Stephanie Terry
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Community Literacy: Can Writing Make a Difference?
The Quarterly,
Spring/Summer 1994
Linda Flower, Lorraine Higgins, Wayne C. Peck
This excerpt from Community Literacy by Wayne Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins describes the work of the Pittsburgh Community Literacy Center's community–university collaborative. Seeing the need for a working intercultural discourse that lets people cross barriers of race, class, gender, and economics, the authors show how new ideas in education can help shape the conversation and how writing, and learning to use writing for social action, can sit at the center of such a discourse. They describe their process, in which teens enter a policy discussion about suspension and college mentors enter the discourse of inner city teens.
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TR 67. From Invention to Social Action in Early Childhood Literacy: A Reconceptualization through Dialogue about Difference
National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy Technical Report,
1993
Anne Haas Dyson
Dyson contrasts dominant assumptions about appropriate developmental practices (i.e., invented spelling, process writing) with children's interpretations of those practices, interpretations grounded in children's social and cultural worlds.
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Writing in Community
The Quarterly,
Winter 1991
Ben Clarke
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OP 08. Writing and Reading in the Community
National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy Occasional Paper,
1989
Jenny Cook-Gumperz, Marcia Farr, Robert Gundlach
This paper reviews recent scholarship on writing and reading in the community and explores these literacies as social practices with implications for writing and reading instruction in school.
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Writing Testing Reading
The Quarterly,
April 1987
Marcie Wolfe
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