Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 38, Issue 3, 2004

The authors gave the following talk at the 2003 NCTE Annual Convention in San Francisco upon receiving the Alan C. Purves Award, presented to the RTE article from the previous year’s volume judged most likely to have an impact on classroom practice. Writing as lead author, Pauline Harris traces the history of her interest in children’s intertextuality through her life as a classroom teacher, her doctoral studies in the Bay Area, and her recent work with colleagues Jillian Trezise and W. N. Winser in Australia. As they describe the impetus behind their award-winning article and suggest directions for future research, the authors challenge classroom teachers to understand children’s intertextuality as a source of pleasure and complexity, and as a guide to appropriate and engaging instruction.

While recent studies have demonstrated the importance of material structures in shaping writers’ roles and practices in academic settings, relatively little attention has been focused on temporality, which exists as an embedded aspect of all such structures.

English departments are increasingly under pressure to offer writing courses online, but research that informs effective pedagogies—including effective ways to respond to students’ drafts—is still limited.

In 1986, while still at Harvard, I started teaching summer school at the Bread Loaf School of English, the graduate program in English of Middlebury College. Bread Loaf offers courses in literature, theater, and writing—where I fit in. I came to that job with a background in applied linguistics and cognitive development, but not in literature, and so started out feeling professionally marginal. But appropriation of interests and understandings from repeated participation in a powerful environment has its effects, and I’m now increasingly intrigued by differences in perspectives on texts between language research and the humanities. This is my first attempt to consider them together.