Resource Topics

Teaching Writing - Diversity/Equity

African American Learners Project Annotated Bibliography

March 2008
This collection of readings reflects the contributions of the Thinking and Development Team for the African American Learners Project. These readings are intended to inform the thinking and practice of teacher-consultants and writing project sites interested in addressing the racial gap in student achievement. More ›

Bibliography: Whiteness Studies

May 2008
This bibliography lists some key texts for those wishing to know more about the antiracist agenda of whiteness studies, which recognizes the need to identify "white" as a racialized category and challenges whiteness as a powerful symbol of privilege. More ›

Book Review: Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students

Teacher Magazine, July 2008
Mary K. Tedrow
After reading this collection of essays by three leading thinkers in African American education, Mary Tedrow, a teacher-consultant with the Northern Virginia Writing Project, realized that "the ideas and potential solutions embedded in this book have gone on largely unacknowledged." More ›

Helping African American Males Reach Their Academic Potential

May 2008
Marlene Carter
Marlene Carter, associate director of the UCLA Writing Project, conducted a two-year study of African American males in her AP English class. The study helped her understand that these students underperform for different reasons and allowed her to focus on the real problems affecting their achievement. More ›

Learning From Laramie: Urban High School Students Read, Research, and Reenact The Laramie Project

May 2008
Marsha Pincus
When Marsha Pincus, a teacher with the Philadelphia Writing Project, had her students read The Laramie Project, and then research circumstances surrounding the play's real life events and perform its scenes, they were engaged—and changed—by its themes of homosexuality, homophobia, and murder. More ›

Project Outreach 3 Annotated Bibliography

May 2008
This Project Outreach 3 collection of articles and book chapters has helped sites' leadership teams inquire into access, relevance, and diversity at their local site. More ›

Project Outreach at the Connecticut Writing Project-Fairfield: Change the Readings, Change the Site

May 2008
Connecticut Writing Project-Fairfield asked itself whether its philosophy and methods made clear, practical sense to teachers of urban students in its service area. In response to the question, the site changed its summer institute readings to explicitly introduce topics of race, culture, and language. More ›

Rural Poverty and the Importance of Place Value

May 2008
Angela Kirby
Angela Kirby, a teacher with the Crossroads Writing Project in Michigan, stresses that the education of rural disadvantaged youth needs to focus especially on guiding these students toward living well within their communities. More ›

Sherman Alexie in the Classroom

2008
Sherman Alexie in the Classroom, a volume in NCTE's High School Literature Series, examines ways to teach the works of Alexie, widely considered today's premiere Native American writer. Heather Bruce, director of the Montana Writing Project, coauthored the book. More ›

Using Genre in the Social Studies Classroom

April 2008
Keri E. Scheidel
In this chapter from Writing Intention: Prompting Professional Learning through Student Work, Kari Scheidel, who is with the Lake Michigan Writing Project, discusses how she immerses her students in the study of American history by introducing them to writing in genres such as plays, news articles, and brochures. More ›

Why Are the Asian American Kids Silent in Class?

Winter 2008
Carol Tateishi
Author Carol Tateishi, co-director of the Bay Area Writing Project, probes into why Asian American kids are silent—a difficult question that dates back several generations. The answers are complex, but the recommendations Tateishi puts forth are more than possible. More ›

Book Review: An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity

January 2007
Sondra Perl
Perl reviews this collection of Mike Rose's writings, which addresses such topics as writing, teaching, research methods, social justice, and the purposes of education within a democracy. More ›

Boys’ Literacy Camp Sets a Standard

July 2007
When adolescent readers can read, but won't read, how can teachers get them engaged? Teacher-consultants in Maine created a summer wilderness camp where students must read in order to do things they want to do. More ›

Gloria Ladson-Billings Reframes the Racial Achievement Gap

April 2007
Gloria Ladson-Billings
Gloria Ladson-Billings suggests reframing the idea of the racial achievement gap as one of educational debt in this address to the 2007 Urban Sites Network Conference in Washington, DC. More ›

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Biographical Information and List of References

January 2007
Bob Fecho
In a resource developed for NWP's African American Learners Project, Bob Fecho discusses Ladson-Billings' 2006 American Educational Research Association address as well as her writings and contributions to the field of education. More ›

Honoring the Word: Classroom Instructors Find That Students Respond Best to Oral Tradition

Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education, Winter 2007
Michael Thompson
Thompson, a teacher-consultant with the Bisti Writing Project (NM), interviews teachers of native students who contrast the oral tradition of native culture with the rhetorical structures of western writing. This article won a gold in the Society of National Association Publishers' "Magazines–Feature Article, 10,000 or fewer" category. More ›

Project Outreach Promotes Family Writing

July 2007
By providing occasions for parents and their children to write together, three Project Outreach sites forged new connections with schools, teachers, and families in previously underserved communities. More ›

TIC Study Group Focuses on Racism and Homophobia

July 2007
Gavin Tachibana
An NWP inquiry group focuses on race and sexual orientation, providing a safe place for teachers to explore these areas, develop curricula, discover methods for handling controversy, and honor the backgrounds of all their students. More ›

Why We Are Sticking To Our Stories

Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education, Winter 2007
Tina Deschenie
In the Winter, 2007 Tribal College Journal, Deschenie, a teacher-consultant with the Bisti Writing Project (NM), discusses the value of storytelling in her native family. This article won a bronze in the "Magazines-Editorial" category from the Society of National Association Publishers. More ›

A Work in Progress: The Benefits of Early Recruitment for the Summer Institute

National Writing Project at Work, 2006
Anne-Marie Hall, Roger Shanley, Flory Simon
More ›

A Writing Activity to Help Students with Attention Disorders

November 2006
Judy Willis
Neurologist, author, and middle school teacher-consultant Judy Willis devised a strategy to reproduce what learning feels like for those with attention disorders. She writes about her classroom's results and describes how teachers might replicate the lesson themselves. This article received the Association of Educational Publishers Distinguished Achievement Award. More ›

Creating Empathetic Connections to Literature

The Quarterly, 2005
Lesley Roessing
Taken aback by her eighth grade students' dry-eyed response to The Diary of Anne Frank, Roessing finds a way to help students convert the "them" they encounter in multicultural literature into "us." More ›

Lorenzo and a Christmas Door to Remember

The Quarterly, 2005
Melba Salazar-Lucio
A Christmas door–decorating contest inspires a class of at-risk high school students to drop their apathy, and a Christmas card from the teacher touches one student more deeply than she could have imagined. More ›

Teachers Enter the “Writing Project Way”

The Voice, 2005
Linette Moorman
At 18 NWP sites, the New Teacher Initiative (NTI) provides a supportive community where novice teachers have found "solace and refuge, as well as identity and challenge as professionals." More ›

The Professional Leadership Development Project

National Writing Project At Work, March 2005
Zsa Boykin, Sarah Robbins, Jennifer Scrivner
More ›

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. More ›

Writing with William

The Quarterly, 2005
Margaret Simon
Simon describes tutoring a fifth–grader in writing, introducing him to techniques such as sentence variety. His writing remains lusterless. Then he chooses a topic he's passionate about and finds his writing voice. More ›

Brown v. Board of Education at 50: The Long and Winding Road to Educational Equity

The Voice, 2004
Amy Bauman
A recounting of the keynote speech from the 2004 NWP Spring Meeting in which author Samuel Yette described the historical contexts leading up to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. More ›

Book Review: “Reading Don't Fix No Chevys”: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men, by Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm

The Quarterly, 2004
Bob Sizoo
Bob Sizoo reviews "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys": Literacy in the Lives of Young Men, which examines how to engage boys in school literacy. More ›

Book Review: Literacies, Lies, and Silences: Girls Writing Lives, by Heather E. Bruce

The Quarterly, 2004
Shirley Brown
Brown reviews this text, which demonstrates how the inclusion of intensive writing in a women's studies course can enable girls to reexamine their lives and gain courage to know and be themselves. More ›

Book Review: Politics, Language, and Culture: A Critical Look at School Reform, by J. Check

The Quarterly, 2004
Marcie Wolfe
Wolfe reviews Joseph Check's Politics, Language, and Culture, which critiques the "top-down" process of educational reform and focuses on the struggle for school reform in four complex urban environments. More ›

Linking Genre to Standards and Equity

The Quarterly, 2004
Tom Fox
Fox describes the work of three teachers who have successfully linked genre and purpose and provided evidence that "a thoughtful pedagogy of genres can bridge the gap between disenfranchised students and communities and schools." More ›

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. More ›

Reflections on Race in the Urban Classroom

The Quarterly, 2004
Janice Jones
Jones describes her mishandling of her encounter with the only white student in a class of primarily African American and Latino students. Because of the experience, Jones has grown as a teacher and a person. More ›

Teaching in the Time of Dogs

The Quarterly, 2004
Todd Goodson
This account of a classroom incident makes clear that it's the students who bring "the uncertainty that is the beauty and the challenge of teaching." Goodson argues for "taking the students . . . as our starting point." More ›

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. More ›

Finding the Student in a High-Stakes World: A Challenge for Teachers and Test Makers

The Quarterly, 2003
Glenda Moss
Moss examines some of the unintended consequences of high–stakes testing and describes how she confronted them. More ›

How Can Teacher Inquiry Help Achieve Equitable Outcomes for Students?

The Voice, January-February 2003
Linda Friedrich
The core work of the Teacher Research Collaborative is to investigate how teacher inquiry can address the challenges encountered in the effort to ensure that all children achieve at high levels. More ›

Inclusion and the Multiple Intelligences: Creating a Student-Centered Curriculum

The Quarterly, 2003
Jennifer Borek
Echoing Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences, Borek identifies learning similarities in her students and describes ways she uses knowledge of those similarities in her classroom. More ›

The Politics of Correction: How We Can Nurture Students in Their Writing

The Quarterly, 2003
Linda Christensen
How do we help students gain fluency in Standard English without obliterating their home languages? The author provides some answers: through scientific assessment, structured minilessons, and respect for home language. More ›

Tolerating Intolerance: Resisting the Urge to Silence Student Opinion in the Writing Classroom

The Quarterly, Winter 2003
Sarah Rider
Encountering one student's white supremacist views, a teacher realizes that the expression of diverse opinions in class mustn't be restricted to those that please the instructor. A Society of National Association Publications Gold Award winner. More ›

Writing in Home Dialects: Choosing a Written Discourse in a Teacher Education Class

The Quarterly, Spring 2003
Eileen Kennedy
Kennedy, who teaches speakers of Caribbean Creole, uses the authentic language of her students to help them develop stronger voices as writers and become more competent writers of Standard English. More ›

Any Tilt Will Lose the Game

The Quarterly, Fall 2002
Kathy Thomas
Thomas is forced into a difficult position when a student expresses resistance to an assignment in a confrontational manner. She reflects on possible responses and manages to defuse the situation without severing ties with her student. More ›

Searching for Excellence in Education

The Quarterly, Winter 2002
Catherine Crystal
Catherine Crystal, a teacher–researcher who spent a five–month sabbatical teaching in Hanoi, Vietnam, shares what she learned about the educational system in Vietnam and how it fuels a drive for excellence in students. More ›

Where Does Spite Fit Into the Rubric?

The Quarterly, Fall 2002
Anna Moore
Wondering how—or if—her feelings toward a student should play into an evaluation of the student's grade, author Moore offers readers an honest look at a teacher's struggle. More ›

Saving a Seat for Joseph

The Quarterly, Winter 2001
Maria Russel
Russell reflects on how one student, Joseph, led her to peel away the protective layers that she had justified as necessary for her classroom survival. She now recognizes how they made her "inflexible . . . not a good thing." More ›

Teacher Motivated by a Sense of Mission

The Voice, November-December 2001
Art Peterson
A profile of Southern Nevada Writing Project teacher Marcus Mason reveals his motivation for teaching and his methods for helping his fifth grade students engage meaningfully with their writing and schoolwork. More ›

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. More ›

Bicultural Literacy: A Personal Exploration

The Quarterly, Fall 2000
Marcia Venegas-Garcìa
Venegas–Garcia tells her personal biliterate, bicultural story to "encourage . . . particularly those in power, to recognize that all children have their stories of literacy," and to encourage a "less myopic," more diverse view of teaching and learning. More ›

Struggling Against Culture and Power

The Voice, January-February 2000
Jeannie Oakes
Outreach programs confront powerful cultural forces bent on preserving the status quo. Alone they are unlikely to produce UC student bodies that reflect California's diversity. More ›