The Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s award recipient, Denise Dávila, for her article, “#WhoNeedsDiverseBooks?: Preservice Teachers and Religious Neutrality with Children’s Literature” (which appeared in Volume 50, Number 1, of Research in the Teaching of English, pp. 60–84). The Alan C. Purves Award is given annually to an article in RTE that holds significant implications for informing classroom practice and is likely to have the greatest impact on instruction and classrooms.

Although multiple studies have found that peer review is an effective instructional practice for the teaching of academic writing in K–12 settings, little research exists that documents students’ views of peer review and the features that make peer review tasks useful or challenging for writing development. In this study, we investigated high school students’ perceptions of peer review through a questionnaire administered to 513 students from four schools who had used SWoRD, an online peer review system. Data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our findings demonstrate that most students viewed peer review as helpful to their writing development and that students consistently viewed three features of the SWoRD peer review system as most beneficial: anonymity of writers and reviewers, opportunities to review other students’ writing, and feedback from multiple readers. Students reported difficulty with managing conflicting reviews and wording their feedback. Our study contributes to existing research on peer review of writing by suggesting that secondary peer review activities would be more helpful to students if they considered students’ concerns about social positioning and face-saving, allowed writers to receive feedback from multiple reviewers, and taught students how to manage conflicting reviews. Additionally, our study suggests that the benefits of reviewing have been greatly underestimated in existing research and that students would benefit from more opportunities to give, as well as receive, feedback on academic writing.

In this essay, I propose that literacy scholars who are parents, such as myself, rarely discuss how the choices we make in the education of our children sometimes conflict with our ideals as literacy researchers and problematize our praxis as scholars committed to social justice. I share examples from my own experience as a White, middle-class parent of children in an urban school district to demonstrate how my scholarship, advocacy for educational equity, and decisions about my children’s education are intertwined in complex ways and sometimes conflict. These examplesserve to illuminate the multiple, sometimes contradictory, ethical commitments many of us have—ethical commitments that are not always easy to reconcile. I argue that our work as literacyscholars would better serve our goals of educational equity if we balanced our ideals with honest conversations about the difficult decisions we make daily as we struggle to provide the besteducational opportunities for all children, including our own.

Preview this article: Announcing the Alan C. Purves Award Winner (Volume 38), Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/39/3/researchintheteachingofenglish4472-1.gif

Amanda Godley, Jennifer Trainor, Discourses of Reform in Composition: Student Need and Labor Conditions as Useful Knowledge, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Feb., 2000), pp. 481-484

Preview this article: Responses to "After Wyoming: Labor Practices in Two University Writing Programs, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/51/3/collegecompositionandcommunication1389-1.gif

Preview this article: After Wyoming: Labor Practices in Two University Writing Programs, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/50/2/collegecompositionandcommunication1326-1.gif