Writing Teachers' Printed Resources in Van Meter 107 and Online Annotated Bibliographies of Research in Composition Process, Teaching, and Tutoring

        If you are trying to find specific scholarly information about aspects of the composing process, teaching writing, or peer tutoring, you also may want to consult the English 221 Annotated Bibliographies, which are available as hyperlinks from the course's home page.  These articles and book chapters were annotated by one of the Writing Center tutor nominees as part of their training.  Most approach three paragraphs in length, and all summarize the thesis of the work referenced, describe its methodology or evidence when relevant, and comment on its importance to the study of writing, especially in four-year liberal arts colleges with peer tutoring writing centers.  Each year's files are not yet sorted by topic (volunteers welcomed!), but you can quickly browse them for information relevant to your needs.  Use the "Control" key and "F" to start the "Find" function in your browser, and you can enter keywords that describe what you are looking for.

        The following books and articles have been placed in the part- and half-time instructors' office in Van Meter 107 for the use of Writing Program faculty.  Other Goucher faculty, Writing Center tutors, and students in English 221 may use them, as well, but all who take them from the room should be sure to sign them out on the sheet attached to their shelf.  That will help us to recover them. 

Applebee, Arthur N.  Curriculum as Conversation: Transforming Traditions in Teaching and Learning.  Chicago: U Chicago P, 1996.  Applebee summarizes the results of an eight-year study of teaching strategies that examined how teachers created their courses and what results they actually obtained from what they had made.  Stressing a conversational model of education that is particularly well-suited to Goucher’s traditional classroom style, he describes some teaching traditions to avoid (akin to Baron’s grammar myths—see below), as well as attributes he found in a wide range of course designs that were found to work well for both teachers and students.  His main thesis involves “knowledge-in-action,” a collaborative instructional approach designed to motivate learning in aid of student action rather than strictly what we might call “meditative” learning as an end in itself.  Carol Pippen’s August 2002 Workshop cautionary comments about over-investment in a commitment to practical applications of learning are a useful corrective to incautious application of Applebee’s thesis—see Carol for more.  (AS) 

Baron, Dennis.  Declining Grammar: And Other Essays on the English Vocabulary.  Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1989.  Baron studies the history of composition instruction and debates about writing competence since the founding of the United States, drawing important connections between “grammar purity” movements and exclusionary anti-immigrant or class-anxiety struggles.  The essays are short but well-documented.  Main article categories are: “Language Lore,” “Language Usage,” “Language Trends,” and “Language Politics.”  (AS) 

Davis, Robert, and Mark Shadle.  “’Building a Mystery': Alternative Research Writing and the Academic Act of Seeking.”  CCC 51:3 (February 2000): 417-46.  “Alternative forms of research writing that displace those of modernism are unfolded, ending with ‘multi-writing,' which incorporates multiple genres, disciplines, cultures, and media to sycretically gather post/modern forms.  Such alternatives represent a shift in academic values toward a more exploratory inquiry that honors mystery.”  (RD and MS) 

Lee, Carol D. and Peter Smagorinsky, Eds..  Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.  This collection of articles focuses specifically on Lev Vygotsky’s continuing influence on language-acquisition theory and the study of its application in the writing classroom.  The main theme of Vygotskian pedagogy is “collaborative inquiry,” and Applebee’s research (see above) also is a direct descendent from this line of thinking.  The collection’s articles cover writing research theory, practical applications of this way of teaching language skills to ESL and bilingual instruction, writing and community development, small group dynamics in and outside the classroom, and other topics.  (AS) 

McLeod, Susan H. et al., Eds.  WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Writing Across the Curriculum Programs.  Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 2001.  This collection addresses the situation at schools like Goucher where “mature” Writing Across the Curriculum programs have passed their initial “evangelistic” stage in which all participants are freshly infused with the basic goals and techniques of WAC teaching, and have encountered challenges to keep this awareness of WAC alive in the classroom and to bring its strategies to bear on new problems.  The articles relate WAC to computer-based instruction, service learning, interdisciplinary curricula, ESL students’ needs, writing centers, writing intensive courses, and recent research and theory in composition.  (AS) 

“The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives Against the Grain.”  College English 64:1 (September 2001): 41-62.  A symposium discussion about the relationship between autobiography and achieving professional literacy for students and their instructors, the authors present a critique of third-person prose as the preferred form for collegiate writing and expose important ways in which we need personal as well as impersonal writing in order to create connections to our disciplines. (AS)

Roen, Duane, et al., Eds.  Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition.  Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 2002.  Essays in this collection cover a wide range of teaching situations, from the TA’s experience to independent instructors’ courses like those taught at Goucher.  Essay groups are dedicated to practical lesson planning, managing your own course, responding to drafts and polished writing, the use of technology to teach, and using first-year composition to teach grammar, usage, style, and research skills.  In light of our recent conversations about grammar and research skills, though you will find many of these essay useful, I particularly recommend the essays on grammar/punctuation instruction pedagogy by Karolides, Golson, and Licklider, and research skill instruction approaches by Simutis, Gunner, and Reiss.  Please let me know if you would recommend these or other essays in the collection for Goucher faculty who teach writing.  (AS)

 Thompson, Thomas C., Ed.  Teaching Writing in High School and College: Conversations and Collaborations.  Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 2002.  These articles explore what high school writing teachers currently are attempting to achieve in their classrooms, the circumstances under which they are performing, college teachers’ expectations of first-year student writers, and the possibilities for collaborative work by both sets of teachers in each other’s settings.  Main article categories are: “Trading Places, Modeling Collaboration for Preservice Teachers,” “What Is ‘College Writing Anyway?,” “High School to College; How Smooth a Transition?,” “Starting a College in High School,” and “Conversations About Collaboration.” (AS)