Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 39, Issue 4, 2012

This essay offers a rationale for, a history of, and some guidelines for creating a dialogue between high school teachers of writing and college instructors of writing that at minimum can give the participants a doorway to each other and at most can provide their students with some link between the two worlds.

Engaging in a series of student-faculty discussions that highlight student perspectives on their own learning and faculty views on teaching provides opportunities for students and faculty to learn from one another and thereby enhance both teaching and learning.

Based on interviews with students who had recently returned to school, this essay demonstrates the need for, challenges of, and ways to respond to the writing anxiety many adults bring with them back to school.

Making use of the reading, writing, and talking connection, this classroom activity uses annotation to channel specific strategies that facilitate higher-order thinking and generate academic conversations with the text, about the text, and among students.

Teaching developmental students to use simile and metaphor in their essays improves their writing and helps the teacher become a more dialogic reader; moreover, creating original figurative language kindles the analogical imagination that characterizes the academy.

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

What Works for Me includes brief descriptions of successful classroom practices.

Reviewed are: Cross Talk: What Is “College-Level” Writing? Volume 2: Assignments, Readings, and Student Writing Samples, edited by Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg, and Sheridan Blau; Reviews by Abigail Montgomery and Kip Strasma, with a Response by Howard Tinberg College Credit for Writing in High School: The “Taking Care of” Business, edited by Kristine Hansen and Christine R. Farris, Reviewed by Holly Hassell Writing about Writing: A College Reader, by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Reviewed by Jeffrey Klausman