This essay describes an ethnographic assignment in the local community.

A complaint during a spooky story assignment leads the author to rediscover the importance of liberatory, student-driven writing.

The college writing center… . It is a place of political confrontation, where cultural issues involving dialect and values are probed, contested, and negotiated.

This essay explores the diverse uses, misperceptions, and passionate convictions about African American Vernacular among college students, revealing its complicated relevance to our culture.

The author discusses his goal to imbue more reader-response criticism into a religious student’s language experience.

Can we expect students to craft papers that exude energy and insight when they have been subjected to twelve years of carefully orchestrated official writing?

Empowering students to develop their own canon can generate excitement in the classroom and a sense of ownership over literature.

Helping one to imagine himself or herself a writer is much more complex than nurturing a more stable grasp of sentence clarity or spelling. Rather, it involves the ability to nurture the personal introspection and cultural scrutiny that makes writing a source for reflection and transformation.

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Journals can be effective in cultivating formal discourse while respecting cultural differences.

English Teachers’ the Unofficial Guide: Researching the Philosophies of English Teachers; B. Marshall. Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines; M. H. Kells &amp; V. Balester. Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom; D. L. Wallace &amp; H. R. Ewald. Talkin’ That Talk: Language, Culture and Education in African America; G. Smitherman. Writing Simple Poems: Pattern Poetry for Language Acquisition; V. L. Holmes &amp; M. R. Moulton.

Considers how reading Jane Tompkins’ “Sensational Designs” helps foster a new appreciation of the ways in which students contribute to the creation of a literary work. Discusses how students responded to their semester-long study of various “neglected” 19th-century women writers.

Reviews four books: Reading Poverty, by Patrick Shannon; Race, Rhetoric, and Composition, ed. by Keith Gilyard; Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention, by Cynthia L. Selfe; Critical Thinking, Thoughtful Writing: A Rhetoric with Readings, by John Chaffee with Christine McMahon and Barbara Stout

Shows how letter writing can motivate basic writers. Describes how the author began teaching his first remedial writing class with a class-wide engagement in letter writing. Discusses how the class developed an active, collaborative, engaged, and inclusive spirit as students learned to put expression first and polishing later.

Considers how allowing developmental students to incorporate some of their language and culture into their writing helps them become more proficient writers. Suggests that the best way to teach basic writers is through both process and a respect for the social discovery that ensues as one composes.

How does one nurture a student’s alacrity while fostering unity among less gregarious participants?