Although most of the writing in high school English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms is about literature and although there have been incessant calls for changing the practices of teaching and learning literature, only meager amounts of research have been conducted in these interrelated domains of the field. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to address these issues by examining the process of a teacher transitioning her teaching practice to literary argumentation. The ethnographic and discourse analytic case study reported here was part of an eight-year, Institute of Education Sciences (IES) funded research project on teaching and learning argumentative writing in high school ELA classrooms. As part of the larger project, this dissertation study was embedded in a yearlong study of teaching and learning of literary argumentation in an Honor American Literature course at “Davis High School”. The teacher was a white female in her seventh year teaching ELA while the students were in both tenth and eleventh grade and were comprised of 18 students, ten females and eight males. Of the 18 students, 16 students identified as white while two identified as Asian American. Using microethnographic methods, I examined the contextual factors shaping a teacher’s changing approach to literary argumentation, how she and her 10th and 11th grade students’ instructional conversations fostered a shared understanding for literary argumentation; and finally to consider how the context and argumentative writing practices shaped student learning, I traced a case study student’s essay for sources and processes related to the curricular context. This study of changing approaches to the teaching of writing about literature is framed by theories of teacher change and a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis. Findings demonstrated that the teacher attempted to change her literature instruction by introducing literary argumentative practices into her teaching through writing assignments as she worked to cultivate a shared reading to frame her curriculum and to inform and shape her students’ writing about The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925). Findings also indicated that instructional conversations were inconsistent with how and when they contributed to the literacy practices the teacher attempted to bring about as they were influenced by both the teacher’s and students’ previous experiences interpreting literature. The contextualized analysis of student writing revealed that the student negotiated the literary argumentation practices the teacher attempted to bring about through her use of the curricular context. Change for the teacher was a complex process, including relatively easy efforts to develop writing prompts and assignments to foster learning while struggling to modify her uses of instructional conversations to shift to more dialogic practices requiring student ideas. This study contributes to the knowledge base for the teaching and learning of literary argumentation as an understanding of the complexity of teacher change within the legacy of a teacher’s own experiences and within the institutional demands of teaching canonical interpretations of literature.

The essays in this book argue that the active learning strategies that teachers trained in composition use for their literature courses can be exported to other disciplines to enhance both teacher performance and student learning. The book provides and explains examples of those strategies and illustrates how they have been effectively used in other disciplines.

This concise handbook helps educators write for the rhetorical situations they will face as students of education, and as preservice and practicing teachers. It provides clear and helpful advice for responding to the varying contexts, audiences, and purposes that arise in four written categories in education: classroom, research, credential, and stakeholder writing. The book moves from academic to professional writing and chapters include a discussion of relevant genres, mentor texts with salient features identified, visual aids, and exercises that ask students to apply their understanding of the concepts. Readers learn about the scholarly and qualitative research processes prevalent in the field of education and are encouraged to use writing to facilitate change that improves teaching and learning conditions. Book Features: · Presents a rhetorical approach to writing in education. · Includes detailed student samples for each of the four major categories of writing. · Articulates writing as a core intellectual responsibility of teachers. · Details the library and qualitative research process using examples from education. · Includes many user-friendly features, such as reflection questions and writing prompts.

The concept of writing as process has revolutionized the way many view composition, and this book is organized by the stages of that process. Each section begins with a well-known author presenting specific techniques, followed by commentaries which include testimonials, applications of writing techniques, and descriptions of strategy modifications all contributed by classroom teachers. The book includes the following sections and initial chapters: Section 1 (The Process): "Teaching Writing as a Process" (Catherine D'Aoust); Section 2 (Prewriting): "Clustering: A Prewriting Process" (Gabriele Lusser Rico); Section 3 (Prewriting in Different Subjects): "Prewriting Assignments Across the Curriculum" (Jim Lee); Section 4 (Showing, Not Telling): "A Training Program for Student Writers" (Rebekah Caplan); Section 5 (Using Cooperative Learning to Facilitate Writing): "Using Structures to Promote Cooperative Learning in Writing" (Jeanne M. Stone and Spencer S. Kagan); Section 6 (Writing): "Developing a Sense of Audience, or Who Am I Really Writing This Paper For?" (Mark K. Healy); Section 7 (Teaching Writing in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classroom): "English Learners and Writing: Responding to Linguistic Diversity" (Robin Scarcella); Section 8 (Domains of Writing): "Teaching the Domains of Writing" (Nancy McHugh); Section 9 (Writing the Saturation Report): "Using Fictional Techniques for Nonfiction Writing" (Ruby Bernstein); Section 10 (Point of View in Writing): "A Lesson on Point of View...That Works" (Carol Booth Olson); Section 11 (Writing the I-Search Paper): "The Reawakening of Curiosity: Research Papers as Hunting Stories" (Ken Macrorie); Section 12 (Critical Thinking and Writing): "Reforming Your Teaching for Thinking: The Studio Approach" (Dan Kirby); Section 13 (Sharing/Responding): "Some Guidelines for Writing-Response Groups" (Peter Elbow); Section 14 (Reader Responses): "Dialogue with a Text" (Robert E. Probst); Section 15 (RAGs for Sharing/Responding): "Using Read-Around Groups to Establish Criteria for Good Writing" (Jenee Gossard); Section 16 (Rewriting/Editing): "Competence for Performance in Revision" (Sheridan Blau); Section 17 (Revising for Correctness): "Some Basics That Really Do Lead to Correctness" (Irene Thomas); Section 18 (Building Vocabularies): "Word-Sprouting: A Vocabulary-Building Strategy for Remedial Writers" (Barbara Morton); Section 19 (Evaluation): "Holistic Scoring in the Classroom" (Glenn Patchell); and Section 20 (Evaluation Techniques): "Some Techniques for Oral Evaluation" (Michael O'Brien). Contains over 100 references. (EF)

This book presents a range of teaching strategies developed by teachers of literature who have heard the call from students, employers, and academic administrators for more relevant learning experiences in an ever-changing world. Integrating critical theory and classroom experience, the contributors to this book demonstrate how they foster learning, collaboration and cooperation, and creative thinking. The book abounds with descriptions of successful non-traditional teaching strategies. We see teachers collaborating across disciplines and across colleges, in some cases across countries and grade levels, and demystifying literary studies for students brought up on visual media. Many of the contributors lead their campuses in the use of computer-mediated communication and multimedia to support instruction. The chapters exemplify the shift from understanding teaching as "making students see what the teacher sees," to inviting them to engage texts together, as a community, and to learn how, with their teacher, knowledge and authority are culturally and socially constructed. In Learning Literature in an Era of Change practicing teachers offer their peers in literature and composition, and faculty developers, an exciting range of new models where professors are partners in learning, and where education is not delivered but discovered and disseminated.

Without contraries there is no progression. ---William Blake This is a book about reality and hope. Its chapters reframe the concept of gap, acknowledging distances (for example, acknowledging old insights and theory while also honoring teacher discovery). However, it refuses to bow under the weight of these challenges. Its contributors focus, instead on how to overcome acknowledged inadequacies in learning how to teach writing as well as how to practice principled literacy instruction. These contributors see gaps not as unbridgeable chasms, but rather as opportunities to educate their students to use writing to understand the broader context of their education and pre-service candidates to adapt curriculum creatively. Contributors include new and seasoned secondary school teachers, graduate students, and university faculty who together remind us of “old insights needing to be passed along” (Villanueva) and show us new practices that challenge the conventions of the status quo and promote social justice. To close the gaps, in short, they demonstrate how rhetoric and truth are intertwined. In a time when too many children continue to be left behind, this book should be required reading for all literacy teachers because it is in our continued willingness to learn from each other that hope resides.