Discovering Histories of High School Writing Instruction

Kansas English, 2019

By carefully considering our past, we can better adjust our present to improve our future writing and instruction. This article features the reflections of a former high school English teacher and current undergraduate writing methods instructor along with three pre-service English teachers on writing-related artifacts from their personal archives. The co-authors present teaching principles they have developed after reflecting on which writing-related artifacts they've kept, why they've kept those artifacts, and what those artifacts suggest about how we should teach writing. Finally, the co-authors encourage both students and teachers to engage in a similar reflective process and productively dialogue with our writing pasts.

The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, 2019

“I came to explore the wreck,” Adrienne Rich begins in her poem “Diving into the Wreck,” and tumbles to the depths of her questions about efficacy—of speaking, of writing, and of teaching—during a time when students activists shut down campuses across the country, striking for anti-racist education policies from curriculum design to admissions. With a desire to connect our students at Brooklyn and Queens College with the history of student activism at CUNY, we developed a semester long peer-peer writing exchange to take place between our composition classes where our students developed and exchanged writing prompts inspired by Rich’s archival teaching material. By having our students document and record the unfolding of their written exchange, we argue that this type of collaborative project offers a new way of conceiving how participants in a classroom can build, envision, and record new ways of learning. As every classroom leaves behind an archive of writing, notes, and lesson plans, we ask, what do we do with the written materials we and our students leave behind, the materials that signal the embodied work of building a space of learning? How can the work that students leave behind inspire and enact its own unique pedagogy? This paper will present the unfolding of our students’ writing exchange, ultimately demonstrating that the archive of materials left behind by Rich and our own project can further inspire students and instructors to question what is possible while living and working in the ever-shifting space of the writing classroom.

Human IT, 12:3, 2014, 78–116., 2014

This study shows that upper secondary students’ historical writing may be influenced by their use of sources from traditional archives versus their use of digital sources in databases. A qualitative approach, theoretical perspectives, and historical empathy seem to be stimulated primarily by using traditional archives and print sources, while digital archives and sources, in contrast, stimulate the use of quantitative data and a more social scientific approach. The results indicate a historiographical shift in students’ historical thinking, which researchers of history education need to consider in a digital era. The results of this study call for reflections in history teaching to make it possible for students to learn and experience

2019

This paper will describe a unique course collaboration between the Ohio State University Archives Group and an English class (ENG 3405: Proposal Writing), in which students wrote a range of technical proposals and other supporting documents to fund and organize new and ongoing projects. While working on these projects, students developed knowledge of professional genres and styles while practicing individual and collaborative writing practices. As archivists, we often support class projects based on archival research. These projects are typically tied to undergraduate or graduate history courses, and the unique materials held by the Archives are the focus of student work. Often, these projects provide students their first experience with an archives or special collections setting, so instructors typically ask us to provide an overview of the archives before students dive into material for an assignment or term paper. Occasionally assignments will require follow up visits to the Arch...

College English, 2023

This essay uses socio-historical methods to trace how institutional structures shape the development of curriculum and pedagogy, concluding with implications for writing teachers and program administrators. It is an intentional attempt at creating a transdisciplinary space to synthesize knowledge at the intersection of disciplinarity and labor.

2021

Writing in history places high demands on students and is a skill that requires explicit instruction. Therefore, teachers need to be able to teach this in an effective way. In this study, the writing-instruction was designed by a teacher, instead of researchers, as part of a professional development program in the Netherlands. The lessons combined writing and historical reasoning instruction, based on principles of effective writing instruction, including strategy-instruction, modeling, prewriting, and peer-interaction. The effects of these lessons were investigated in a small-scale pilot study, which consisted of a pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design, in which eighty-nine 11th grade students participated (39 in the treatment condition and 50 in the comparison condition). Dependent measures included text quality, writing process measures, students’ knowledge of writing and their self-efficacy. Students in the treatment condition wrote longer and higher quality texts, spent ...

Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Language, Literature, Composition, and Culture, 2018

In this article, a composition scholar and university archivist explore the overlap between the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing and the Framework for Success in Information Literacy for Higher Education. We argue that analysis of the overlap between these two documents helps us articulate a new set of reasons for faculty to connect with their allies in libraries and archives to teach undergraduate research and writing.