This document summarizes the findings of a longitudinal study that followed students from third grade through high school to understand how their experiences with writing instruction impacted their development as writers over time. Key findings include: - In third grade, students were engaged and saw themselves as writers through a balanced curriculum with choice, time, feedback and publication. - By sixth grade, instruction had shifted to an emphasis on five paragraph essays, eliminating creative writing. Students did minimal work and lost motivation. - Interviews in later grades found students still preferred creative writing but saw school writing as rule-bound and dull, focused on meeting requirements instead of expression. Their engagement declined without support for writing as a process.

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1. Structure and freedom: Achieving a balanced writing curriculum................................................................. 1
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3. Document 1 of 1
Structure and freedom: Achieving a balanced writing curriculum
Author: Casey, Mara; Hemenway, Stephen I
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Abstract: An elementary inservice writing consultant and a third-grade teacher designed a writing program for
the teacher's third-grade classroom. The results were so rewarding that the writing consultant decided to
conduct a longitudinal study of these third graders by following them through high school, interviewing them
again in sixth, eighth, tenth and twelfth grades. The findings revealed some important steps all teachers must
take to achieve a balance between structure and curriculum.
Full text: The contradiction of working with elementary teachers as an inservice writing consultant without ever
having been an elementary teacher began to gnaw at me.1 I needed to find out how much writing and revising
kids would do in a language arts program "based on what writers do and need" (Atwell 327), the kind of
program I was always urging on the teachers in my courses. Nina, a former student in one of my inservices at
the Linden School, readily accepted my offer to volunteer in her third grade classroom; she was glad to have an
extra pair of hands so that she could devote more curricular time to writing.2 The results were so rewarding that
I decided to conduct a longitudinal study of these third graders by following them through high school,
interviewing them again in sixth, eighth, tenth, and twelfth grades. The findings in my research were startling
and revealed some important steps all teachers must take to achieve a balance between structure and freedom
in the writing curriculum. The result will be more dynamic writers excited about their abilities to blend exposition
and imagination for more creative communication.
The writing program Nina and I designed, based on the work of Donald Murray and Donald Graves, made
several assumptions about children and writing, none of which was new or original to us:
Children can write, but they must first learn to be careful observers of their surroundings.
Writers should choose their own subjects.
Teachers should model the writing process by writing along with their students and showing that writing is
revision.
Teachers should establish a regular time for writing and support it by providing real audiences and purposes for
writers and opportunities for lots of writing and publication.
When children enjoy writing and discover they have something to say to a real audience, their skills will
improve.
Since, as Seidman says, little research on American schooling had been based on the perspectives of students
and teachers (4), I asked the children and their teachers the same questions every two years:
What is writing like to you?
What do you think writing is like to your teachers (students)?
What do good writers do when they write?
What do you do when you write?
What kind of a teacher do you need (do your students need) to be a good writer?
Having decided on our program's goals, Nina and I agreed that I'd come to her classroom two days a week,
from September to January, and that we'd publish a class book of the children's writing-- planned, designed,
and put together by the children, with our help-at the end of the project. We planned together every week; on
Tuesdays I worked with small groups of kids, while Nina worked on math with other groups; on Fridays we
worked together, taking turns teaching minilessons to the whole class; modeling writing; leading small and large
group brainstorming, discussion, writing, and feedback sessions; and helping individual writers. In January, the
book was finally published, immediately read aloud to the principal, placed in the school library, and sent home
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4. to every family. I wanted to know how these third graders had interpreted the hard work of the past sixteen
weeks. What did all of this writing, revising, and being published for the first time mean to kids who had done
little writing in second grade and complained so bitterly in September that their hands hurt and that writing was
boring? Did they like writing now and think of themselves as writers? Taking three or four fidgety kids at a time
into the school library, I sat with them on the floor, turned on the tape recorder, and asked my first question:
What is writing like to you?
Although we have rarely been trained to do it, our job as teachers is "to insure that the voices of children
become embodied in the ways in which we teach" (Taylor 49). For this reason, this essay foregrounds the voice
of Page, one of Nina's students, as I tried to understand the changes in her writing behavior by seeing how she
had interpreted her experiences with writing and its teaching in late elementary school, junior high, and high
school. Understanding how students define their classroom situation is the "only way one can make sense of
their actions" (Delamont 74).
The Third Grade Interview
Page was passionate about writing. "I can do writing good,- she said confidently. "But sometimes it's boring, like
combing your hair." She hated combing her long, snarly blonde hair, but "then I keep on combing it, and that's
like revising it more and more times. Then, once I'm done combing my hair, or once I'm done writing my story,
it's fun, and I feel proud of myself, and I get a lot of compliments."
The other children made equally charming similes. Marshall said writing was like playing baseball; Isabella said
it was like learning to walk when you're a baby; Alice said it was like cleaning your room, when you want it to be
clean, but you don't want to do it. All these comparisons showed the children's love/hate relationship with
writing, combined with the firm belief that they were teaching themselves to write by trial, error, hard work, and
persistence. "I like being in my writing group, because you get more attention on your story," Page continued,
leafing through the six drafts she had written about her cat, Tigger, for the class book. "If the class was all
together, instead of in small groups, the teacher would be rushing around, trying to help everybody, and one
person wouldn't get attention, or the other person wouldn't. There'd be too many questions. You'd be
confused."3
From interviewing Page and her classmates, I learned that most of the third graders now thought of themselves
as writers. Remarkably, they, like the children in the profiles collected by Sally Hudson-- Ross, Linda Miller
Cleary, and me, supported the expert advice of Donald Murray, Donald Graves, Nancie Atwell, and Linda Rief
(xi): they understood that writing well was difficult, but possible, if they kept at it, took risks, tolerated mistakes,
and were given real audiences, sufficient chunks of time, topic choice, teacher support, high but reachable
teacher expectations, feedback from many readers, and opportunities to revise and publish. In this classroom,
writing was hard work while they were doing it, but fun and well worth the effort when they were finished. I never
doubted that children with such personal understandings about the writing process would continue to produce
good, thoughtful, carefully revised writing throughout their school careers. I looked forward to the subsequent
interviews.
The Sixth Grade Interview
I was excited to see Page and her classmates again after a gap of three years, during which I had moved from
the northeast to California. Arriving early at Linden School on a June morning, I set up my tape recorder in a
storage room and waited for the children. When Page arrived with a current writing sample, she rather
sheepishly handed me a voiceless, unrevised, and formulaic essay on starvation in Africa, a topic she admitted
knowing little about. "This is so dull," she said, giggling. "I would have written about ten more pages if I had
known more about the subject."
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5. According to Delamont, students "find out what they are supposed to be doing and how little they can get away
with" (82). Page's reply to my question-"Why didn't you research the topic?"showed that she knew what she
could get away with: "We're not supposed to research it. We-e-11, she didn't tell us to research it. Maybe I
should have," she reflected, as if this possibility had suddenly occurred to her. "So when it came time to hand it
in, I just turned this one in. I was so bored of doing it." Several more interviews like Page's that day revealed
what I had never expected to find: my former third graders who once wrote to please themselves were now
churning out lifeless, largely unrevised writing to please their apparently easily-pleased teacher. This discovery
was disappointing, but what really amazed me was that the children knew that their writing wasn't good, knew
exactly why it wasn't good, but were doing it anyway.
Why were students losing their motivation for writing at such a young age? I knew that this often happened to
students in high school, when, according to Linda Miller Cleary, Tom Newkirk, and Tom Romano, they have few
opportunities to write anything but formulaic exposition because "many teachers view nonexpository writing as
frivolous and softheaded" (Romano 3). But what had happened to these once promising students by the time
they had reached sixth grade at Linden School?
According to Page, narrative and expressive writing were largely prohibited because the five paragraph essay
dominated the sixth grade writing curriculum. Page's teacher felt pressured to prepare the students for what she
had heard writing was going to be like in junior high. When she had taught fifth grade, this teacher let the
students write journals and fiction, but now she felt that she must eliminate fiction: "A boy in my class last year
came over from the junior high and said, `If you teach anything, make sure they know how to write a five
paragraph essay on a book they read, because we do it every week, and you get Fs if you don't do it right."'
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6. This teacher had another reason for avoiding fiction: her belief that teaching it was completely different from
teaching essays. "As a writing teacher, I have a very hard time helping them with intent and narrowing their
focus in fiction," she admitted. "In fiction they tend to ramble on, and it's harder for me to zero in on what it is
that would make it more successful. And as a group they tend to say, `That was good,' or `That was bad,' or
`We liked that,' or We didn't,' and not be able to help as much with fiction." In this classroom the students lost
the holistic understanding of writing they had developed in third grade, even though they were then doing
narrative and descriptive writing for the class book and research-based essays in science and social studies.
Now Page and her classmates shared their teacher's binary thinking about two completely different kinds of
writing-"creative" and assignments (essays). You write fiction just to please yourself, the children told me.
Anything goes, because writers are in complete control-free to express their own ideas and feelings, with
absolutely no rules to follow. As Page explained, "It doesn't take that much energy to write when you don't have
an assignment. You can just let your mind go free. You just let your imagination go wild. There's no right way to
write any kind of story." The students wanted to write nothing but fiction, not only because it was forbidden, but
also because they longed to express their own ideas and feelings. In third grade all writing was hard work to
Page, like combing her long, snarly hair, but now she thought that writing fiction was easy, like modern art. "A
kid could just go up to a piece of paper and draw something so simple. And it could be beautiful and get sold for
millions of dollars." Page's notion that there were no standards in writing fiction reflected her teacher's difficulty
in evaluating it.
Not surprisingly, given the perceived oppositions in the writing curriculum, the sixth graders defined
assignments as reductively as they did fiction: essays were written to please the teacher, reflecting the
teacher's ideas, never the student's; they were always dull, boring, factual, voiceless, and composed in a
mechanical, rule-bound, and entirely different way from fiction. Essays made her writing feel dull, Page said,
because "they don't let kids think about what they want to write about and give them the chance to do it by
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7. themselves." Given her simplistic definition of essays, I was not surprised that Page thought of writing as similar
to working on a factory production line: "It goes through so many steps. Like thinking and jotting things down.
First draft. Go through it to see if that's the way you like your writing to be. Second draft. Third draft. Proofread
it." Page's writing had obviously been getting more and more mechanical, passing through predictable stages in
a boring process to turn out piecework on demand.
According to Cusick, research shows that students "develop a reasonable way of constructing their behavior
based on their perceptions of their situation" (205). Perceiving the binary oppositions in this curriculum with its
injunction against fiction and believing that essays could not express her own thoughts and feelings, Page
adopted two opposed writing processes, one for fiction at home and one for essays at school. She loved writing
at home because she could give herself the right amount of time: "At home I do as many drafts as I need." It
was worth the effort, since she was able to express her own ideas.
But it was different in school. "In sixth grade drafts and drafts and drafts aren't required," Page explained. "You
don't have time to revise, and the subjects are boring. When we revise, you read it over and correct run-on
sentences or bad English." Now just smoothing over the top layer, instead of combing and combing until she got
the snarls out of her thinking, Page had become an alienated factory worker in her school writing, writing in a
way she knew could not produce good writing and doing as little as she could get away with. Hard work wasn't
required. "My writing group doesn't make any suggestions, and my teacher always writes good comments,"
Page noted.
It was disconcerting to see that, although Page knew how to evaluate her own writing, this selfknowledge had
not made her a better school writer, despite Rief's and Atwell's assertions that the better students become at
evaluating their own writing, the better their writing becomes. "I did better writing in third grade than I do now
because of all the revising we did," Page admitted. "It made you think about what you were writing. We went
over our drafts for the class book about sixteen times. It made the story good at the end, like you could publish
this now." She continued, sounding like a writing consultant, as she told me what she needed from her teacher
in order to write well: "If you really want to do good writing, you have to concentrate and think about it. You have
to work on one subject for a long time. And the teacher has to keep the idea going that you should do drafts and
drafts and drafts."
Listening to Page talk so matter-ot-factly about the better writing she did in third grade, I finally realized that the
personal understandings of the writing process constructed by all of us in Nina's third grade classroom had not
been-and never could be-sufficient to make these students continue to put that personal knowledge into
practice in their school-sponsored writing, although, like Page, many were still acting on that knowledge in the
drafts they did on their own at home. I suddenly saw how naive and egocentric I had been to think that I had
taught the children so well in third grade that they would continue to put the same effort and care into their
school writing, unless their subsequent teachers continued to provide them with what they, along with Atwell,
know all writers need-"plenty of time to write and plenty of opportunities for choice, response, and publication"
(20).
"The reality is that much as you'd like to create self-reliant kids, kids who are self-directed and self-motivated,"
Nina observed when I told her that our kids were no longer writing according to what they knew about the
writing process, "they won't do things that are hard by themselves [in school], unless you give them that time.
And so by not giving them that time, in a sense what you're saying is you're not valuing writing as a process."
None of us knew then that third grade would be the last year this group of students as a whole would have that
consistent time, support, and ownership for their school writing, although some were lucky enough to get it, here
and there, from individual teachers during the rest of their public school careers.
The Eighth Grade Interview
As soon as I turned on the tape recorder, Page told me what I didn't want to hear. "I used to really like English,
writing in journals and stuff, but I don't like writing anymore,- she lamented. "Everything's so fined up in the
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8. junior high, kinda like a checkerboard," she said, echoing the factory assembly line comparison she had used in
sixth grade. "She gives you an assignment, you hand it in, and you get it back. No one ever talks about it.
Groups that give constructive criticism would help. If you talk about it, then you understand what you can do to
make it more what you want it to be."
The eighth graders exchanged and graded each other's papers according to guidelines on the board, Page
said. "If you're working with similes and metaphors, you have to make sure they have the requirements. if they
have all the words, you give them ten points." But, the alienated factory worker admitted, "When I do it, I don't
really read it; I just kinda glance over it and give them a good grade. I don't think kids really take it seriously."
When we had last met, Page had two writing processes, one for home and one for school. Now she told me that
she was still doing as many drafts as she needed at home, but that her English teacher didn't require drafts of
the mostly assigned topics, based on the thematic unit they were doing. "She has a lot of grammar. I can't stand
grammar," Page asserted, grumbling that the teacher only corrected her spelling, punctuation, and grammar,
but didn't write any comments on her essays. Working hard didn't make sense to her in this classroom.
In Linden School her writing was not graded, but now in the academically competitive world of the junior high
school, grades were a dilemma for Page. "All teachers have different styles of how they want to have you write,"
she complained. Like Sizer, who asserts that learning requires a "climate in which a student knows that he can
ask any question with the assurance that a well-known adult will attend to it" (94), Page wished that her
teachers would "make you feel as if you could talk to them, and you didn't have to just do the assignment and
just hope you got a good grade on it. You could talk to them and ask them for help and stuff." Last year in
seventh grade her English teacher was "not as much into just grading and telling people what's right and
wrong," Page explained. "She'd listen to you. If she said something, and you didn't agree, you knew you
wouldn't feel bad saying something."
Another problem for Page was that junior high teachers "often construct a role that is less personal and more
guarded" (Finders 29). Page knew almost nothing about any of her teachers. Understanding that learning
requires a strong relationship between teacher and student, she said that she liked Linden School so much
better because it was "more hands on and you got to know your teachers." She still remembered that in third
grade "we sat in the corner and had to do drafts and drafts and drafts, until it was perfect." Good writers do that,
she insisted, admitting to no longer practicing what she preached since it was not required in eighth grade.
The Tenth Grade Interview
By tenth grade the girl who once loved writing and considered herself a good writer told me she had become a
bad writer who "can't really do it very well, according to teachers and stuff." She seemed even more worried
about grades than she was in eighth grade, "too much of a perfectionist," according to her present English
teacher. "I'm continually telling her, 'Page, just put it down. just get something down, and we'll take it from
there,"' he reported. "She's one of the last to begin because she's getting the perfect idea. She's one of the last
to finish in class and needs more time at home and a great deal of individual attention in the computer lab,
constantly asking `Can you help me here? What do you think about this"'
Page agreed that she was a perfectionist. "I like to have it right the first time, so when I go back, all I have to do
is fix maybe a few sentences and not change around whole paragraphs." She had forgotten that good writing
requires combing and combing until she got the knots out of her thoughts. Telling me that she liked elementary
school much better than junior high, Page wished that teachers understood that kids need freedom of
expression. They should make the students feel as if it's okay to write all the things that you want to write and
not feel as if I might not get a great grade on this because I'm not doing what I think the teacher's gonna like.
But that doesn't seem to happen because every teacher is different.
Because each teacher is different, Page said that her problem was figuring out what her English teacher wanted
her to write and feeling she must choose between writing what she wanted to write, enjoying writing it, and
getting a bad grade; or writing what the teacher wanted, hating writing it, and getting a good grade. "I don't know
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9. what kind of style to use. It's like you have to write almost in their style of writing for them to like it. You have to
conform almost to the way they write, or otherwise you're gonna get like B minuses, instead of As."
Compounding the dilemma for her was that "you get a new teacher every year, so their style of writing changes.
It's a problem that you don't have English teachers for four years." Complaining that she felt restricted because
a lot of high school writing is so structured, Page claimed that it was easier to write in social studies because it's
factual. In English, she said, "It's not fun. I don't like it because he makes you think there's only one place to put
your thesis sentence and one right way to read the books we have to write about. And you're like, `Oh, but it
was so good the way I read it.'" Discouraged about her writing, Page longed to express her own thoughts and
feelings. "I like using writing more as a form of expression than the way they have us do it now. They cut that
off, and it's almost a shame because it's part of the development of people, just developing in your own way and
not having it so structured." She understood that "what matters most in our classrooms, despite what test
designers might advocate, is the quality of subjective experiences students achieve with reading and writing"
(Romano 195).
Page's proposed solution to her dilemma involved a balance between the anarchy of complete freedom, her
definition of fiction, and the paralysis of mindless structure, her definition of essays: "I wish they could have a
universal format that would be structured enough, but still give you the freedom to express yourself. Then you
still can get out what you want to say and still think that you're gonna do all right on it." Like Peter Elbow, Page
wanted to "resist attempts at priority or hegemony by either side" (192).
The Twelfth Grade Interview
At the end of high school, Page still yearned for a balance between a writing program that was "both
unstructured and analytical," although she hadn't experienced a curriculum like this since seventh grade. She
still wanted to write with passion, and to have writing experiences that "evolve into optimal psychological
experiences" (Romano 195). She knew this could not happen in a program where formulaic expository writing
had a "stranglehold" that "tyrannized students and narrowly defined the nature of acceptable academic writing"
(Romano 3).
Page wished that she could tell teachers what she knew about writing. "Teachers should get experience from
everywhere, listen to how your students respond to what they're writing about, and incorporate the free type of
writing," she said, describing the kind of teacher she needed to become a good writer. Even here, Page tried to
reconcile binary oppositions:
I need a combination between Miss Celio and Miss Burns, our student teacher at the beginning of the year.
She's really earthy, really free-flowing. We did freewrites at the most random times. We did meditations in class.
We did really unstructured writing. She helps you develop yourself out of writing. And she's into interactions with
your peers, the opinions of the class and stuff. If there was a tiny point in the book that had to do with racism,
she wanted to know what the class thought, and we'd have a debate.
Miss Bums was the opposite of Miss Celio, who's really structured, who teaches you your writing skills, who
teaches you your grammar, who gives you vocab lists every single week with thirty thousand words on them.
She was really hard. You had to produce essays in two days in the writing lab, and they had to be like three
page essays. I love Miss Celio. Everybody hated her, but I loved her. If there was someone who could include
all of that type of teaching in the curriculum, I'd be all set.
Conclusion
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10. This is not the usual story of school failure linked to poverty, high dropout rates, and lowest scores on
standardized tests. Most of these students-all white, middle class kids in an academically-oriented suburban
school district known for its excellence and high rate of college attendance-wrote well enough to succeed, often
in honors English classes. Rather, this is a story about waste and loss of student motivation and enthusiasm for
writing; waste and loss of voice, style, ownership, pride, and engagement; lost opportunities to continue to write
with passion, as Tom Romano would put it; and lost opportunities for subsequent teachers to build on the
pleasure and personal satisfaction the students had discovered in primary school writing. And because, as
Denny Taylor argues, students' personal understandings of literacy are "both socially constructed and
individually situated in the practical accomplishments of their everyday lives" (49), each of the students coped
with these losses in his or her own way. This essay shows how Page coped with the dilemma of writing
curricula that contradicted her personal understanding of how to produce good writing and forced her, she
thought, to choose between what she perceived as binary oppositions.
Neither a modern art studio nor a factory production line, the writing classroom created by Page's ideal teacher
would provide time, support, and real audiences for writing; it would unite both fiction and nonfiction, process
and product, content and form, and freedom and discipline; it would include talk about writing, global revision,
opportunities for feedback and publication, and high, but realistic, teacher expectations. In this classroom both
teacher and students would understand that all worthwhile expository prose involves creativity and expressive
writing, just as narrative and expressive writing require thought, structure, and attention to grammar, spelling,
and mechanics. As Romano reminds us, "discourse that renders [experience] can be analytic and logical, too,
just as expository essays can" (4).
Postscript: Page Responds
I was washing my hair this morning, thinking about my response to Mara's article and being part of her
longitudinal study. Recalling the interpretation I had in third grade about what writing was like to me-- like
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11. combing my long, snarly blonde hair-1 realized not much had changed, except that I had discovered
conditioner. Ironically, I was just then rinsing the conditioner through my hair.
As part of Mara and Nina's writing program, I learned four fundamental steps to being a good writer:
brainstorming, discussion, writing/revision, and feedback. They required time and effort from both student and
teacher. There was motivation through the teacher's encouragement of our writing and the prospects of
publishing the result. There was plenty of time allocated to the writing process and freedom to choose what to
write about.
After third grade I was never required to use these steps again. I agree with Delamont that students figure out
what they are supposed to be doing and how little they can get away with. I discovered how to do just enough to
get decent grades. I learned short cuts; I never did many drafts. I had discovered conditioner. It helped with the
snarls and certainly didn't take as much effort. I didn't have to comb and comb and comb, the conditioner
allowed me to brush right through.
All the combing I did used to get me compliments. I don't get many compliments anymore. My hair never looked
as nice as when I combed by hand, over and over, and my writing never turned out as nice either. I struggled to
find the motivation or desire to write something I was proud of. I was frustrated with being assigned such
structured topics, with little freedom to express my views or feelings. I was writing to please the teacher, no
longer to please myself.
I still knew what it took to be a good writer, but because the process we learned from Mara and Nina was no
longer required, there was little motivation to go through it on our own. Had the lessons learned in third grade
been reiterated throughout my schooling, I would have had a more successful academic career and they would
be part of the way I write today.
Sidebar
Call for 2002 Orbis Pictus Nominations
Sidebar
The National Council of Teachers of English announces a call for nominations for the 2002 Orbis Pictus Award
for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. To recommend an outstanding children's nonfiction book published in
2001, please send a letter to one of the Orbis Pictus Committee Co-Chairs: Karen P. Smith, 89 N. Broadway,
Unit #117, White Plains, NY 10603, or Richard Kerper, Elem. Ed. Dept., Millersville University, PO. Box 1002,
Millersville, PA 175510302. Please include the author's name, book title, publisher, copyright date, and a short
description of what you liked about the book. Nominations for the 2002 Orbis Pictus Award must be received by
November 30, 2001. Further information can be found at www ncte.org.
Footnote
Notes
Footnote
1. It seems odd that a coauthored article is written in first person. We have wrestled with the problem of point of
view and decided to use first person because we are presenting the story of Mara's research on Page and her
classmates, though Steve did extensive work on each draft of the manuscript.
2. Mara thanks all students, teachers, parents, and district administrators who cooperated so generously in her
research, as well as the following colleagues for their encouragement and support: Linda Miller Cleary, Charles
Cooper, Lela DeToye, Dan Donlan, John Hollowell, Sally Hudson-Ross, Ken Kantor, Dan Kirby, Dawn Latta,
Bob Land, John Mayher, Tom McCracken, Judy Miller, Meridith Nickamp, Sue Ruskin-Mayher, Dan Sheridan,
Barbara Tomlinson, and Driek Zirinsky.
3. Here Page may seem to be contracting her stated desire to work in groups and her constant need for strokes
from the teacher. Another interpretation is that she is saying kids cannot think for themselves when they have
no choice over the topic and form of their writing.
References
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12. Works Cited
Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning. 2nd ed. Portsmouth,
NH: Boynton/Cook, 1998.
Cleary, Linda Miller. From the Other Side of the Desk: Students Speak Out about Writing. Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton/Cook, 1991.
I Think I Know What My Teachers Want NoV: Gender and Writing Motivation." English Journal 85.1(1996),.50-
57.
Cusick, Philip A. Inside High School: The Student's World. New York: Holt, 1973.
Delamont, Sara. Interaction in the Classroom. London: Methuen, 1976.
References
Elbow, Peter. "The Uses of Binary Thinking: Exploring Seven Productive Oppositions." Taking Stock: The
Writing Process Movement in the '90s. Eds. Lad Tobin and Thomas Newkirk. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook,
1994.179-202.
Finders, Margaret J. just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in junior High. New York: Teachers College Press,
1997.
Graves, Donald H. Writing: Teachers and Children at Work. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1983.
Hudson-Ross, Sally, Linda Miller Cleary, and Mara Casey,
eds. Children's Voices: Children Talk about Literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993.
Murray, Donald M. A Writer Teaches Writing. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
The Craft of Revision. Fort Worth: Holt, 1991. Newkirk, Thomas. More than Stories: The Range of Children's
Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1989.
Rief, Linda. Seeking Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992. Romano,
Tom. Writing with Passion: Life Stories, Multiple
Genres. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995. Seidman, LE. Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for
Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences. New York: Teachers College Press, 1991.
Sizer, Theodore R. Horace's Hope: What Works for the American High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
Taylor, Denny. From the Child's Point of View. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993.
AuthorAffiliation
MARA CASEY teaches at Long Beach City College, California. STEPHEN I. HEMENWAY teaches at Hope
College, Holland, Michigan.
Subject: Writing; Teaching; Students; Curricula;
Publication title: English Journal, High school edition
Volume: 90
Issue: 6
Pages: 68-75
Number of pages: 8
Publication year: 2001
Publication date: Jul 2001
Year: 2001
Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and Communication
Place of publication: Urbana
15 April 2014 Page 10 of 11 ProQuest

13. Country of publication: United States
Publication subject: Education
ISSN: 00138274
CODEN: ENGJBP
Source type: Scholarly Journals
Language of publication: English
Document type: Feature
ProQuest document ID: 237287068
Document URL:
http://search.proquest.com.ezaccess.library.uitm.edu.my/docview/237287068?accountid=42518
Copyright: Copyright National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and
Communication Jul 2001
Last updated: 2010-06-11
Database: Arts & Humanities Full Text
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