NCTE

An expansive look at the discipline of writing studies, with a focus on serving and supporting first-year writing students and instructors at open access institutions.

There is a huge gap between perceptions of the field of writing studies and the material realities of those who teach in it. Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching argues for the centering of the field’s research and service on first-year writing, particularly the “new majority” of college students (who are more diverse than ever before) and those who teach them.

The book features the voices of first-year writing instructors at a two-year, open-access, multi-campus institution whose students are consistently underrepresented in discussions of the discipline. Drawing from a study of 78 two-year college student writers and an analysis of nearly two decades of issues of the major journals in the field of writing studies, Holly Hassel and Cassandra Phillips sketch out a reimagined vision for writing studies that roots the scholarship, research, and service in the discipline squarely within the changing material realities of contemporary college writing instruction.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series

In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

The nature and tools of writing have changed. Today’s students compose and read chunks of webtexts and short text messages while they are on the move. If compositionists wish to be pedagogically relevant, they need to think more carefully about how their students read and compose texts and where they do so.

More and more young people are choosing to write a variety of texts in a variety of locations because technologies make it possible. As a result, educational scholars are developing new understandings of how to incorporate such technologies into the classroom. To that end, this book provides practical resources and assignments for writing instructors who are interested in a pedagogy that makes use of mobile technologies. Editor Claire Lutkewitte and her contributors explore both writing for and about mobile technologies and writing with mobile technologies. 

Coming at a time when instructors are pressured to be professionally innovative but are rarely provided ideal circumstances in which to do so, this book offers: 

• A starting point for instructors who haven’t yet used mobile technologies in the classroom
• Fresh ideas to those who have and proof that they are not alone
• And a call of reassurance that we can do more with less

In Nonfiction Writers Dig Deep, some of today’s most celebrated writers for children share essays that describe a critical part of the informational writing process that is often left out of classroom instruction. 

To craft engaging nonfiction, professional writers choose topics that fascinate them and explore concepts and themes that reflect their passions, personalities, beliefs, and experiences in the world. By scrutinizing the information they collect to make their own personal meaning, they create distinctive books that delight as well as inform. 

In addition to essays from mentor authors, the book includes a wide range of tips, tools, teaching strategies, and activity ideas from editor Melissa Stewart to help students (1) choose a topic, (2) focus that topic by identifying a core idea, theme, or concept, and (3) analyze their research to find a personal connection. By adding a piece of themselves to their drafts, students will learn to craft rich, unique prose. 

Featuring essays by Sarah Albee, Chris Barton, Donna Janell Bowman, Mary Kay Carson, Nancy Castaldo, Jason Chin, Lesa Cline-Ransome, Seth Fishman, Candace Fleming, Kelly Milner Halls, Deborah Heiligman, Susan Hood, Gail Jarrow, Lita Judge, Jess Keating, Barbara Kerley, Heather Lang, Cynthia Levinson, Michelle Markel, Carla Killough McClafferty, Heather Montgomery, Patricia Newman, Elizabeth Partridge, Baptiste Paul, Miranda Paul, Teresa Robeson, Mara Rockliff, Barb Rosenstock, Laura Purdie Salas, Anita Sanchez, April Pulley Sayre, Steve Sheinkin, Ray Anthony Shepard, Anita Silvey, Traci Sorell, Tanya Lee Stone, Jennifer Swanson, Stephen R. Swinburne, Don Tate, Laurie Ann Thompson, Pamela Turner, Patricia Valdez, Sandra Neil Wallace, Laurie Wallmark, Jennifer Ward, Carole Boston Weatherford, Lee Wind, Paula Yoo, and Karen Romano Young.

An insightful and informative guide for many of the situations and issues high school English Language Arts teachers face every day.

From four veteran teacher educators, On the Case in the English Language Arts Classroom offers twenty case narratives as well as a format for discussion, professional resources that can inform decisions, and a guide to constructing new case narratives that can expand the possibilities for developing powerful problem-solving strategies.

Being a high school English teacher is both rewarding and difficult. Although teacher education programs try to be thorough, they can’t prepare preservice teachers for every situation that might arise. For instance:

• How can an ELA teacher work with learners who have suffered significant trauma?
• How can a well-prepared literature instructor teach high school students the basics of reading?
• Should a teacher shy away from classroom conversations because they can become “too political”?
• How does a teacher contend with a crushing workload?

On the Case in the English Language Arts Classroom provides teachers at any point in their career the opportunity to analyze potential situations and problems that commonly confront teachers through case studies that prompt extensive, stimulating discussion and invite written responses.

Rob and Amanda Montgomery provide practical guidance and activities for K-12 teachers to get students out of the classroom and writing in real-world settings.

A Place to Write provides a comprehensive view of how place-based writing can be incorporated into the K–12 curriculum for a range of often transformative student writing experiences and classroom purposes, offering both a rationale for moving students out of the classroom to write in real-world spaces and a how-to guide to help teachers develop their own place-based writing activities. Each chapter explores opportunities for writing in a different real-world setting such as museums, schools, public places, natural places, and even virtual places by detailing a range of practical classroom activities in a variety of commonly taught genres.

Each activity is accompanied by considerations for teachers who may want to forge interdisciplinary connections and/or add authentic audiences to their students’ work. Rob and Amanda Montgomery also suggest adaptations and scaffolding for students with special needs and English language learners.

While encouraging environmental advocacy, the book also encompasses issues of equity and social justice, school safety, and culture and identity, as well as accessible ideas for teaching common genres such as personal narrative, argumentation, and authentic forms of inquiry.

Ted Kesler, with a community of grade school teachers and students, demonstrates how students’ creative responses lead to deep comprehension of diverse texts and ultimately help them to develop their literate identities.

The Reader Response Notebook (RRN) is a tried-and-true tool in elementary and middle school classrooms. However, teachers and students often express frustration with this tool. Responses can read as though students are just going through the motions, with little evidence of deep comprehension. With this book, teacher educator and consultant Ted Kesler breathes new life into the RRN by infusing this work with three key practices: 

• Encouraging responses to reflect design work, using a variety of writing tools
• Expanding what counts as text, including popular culture texts that are important in students’ lives outside of school
• And making the RRN an integral part of a community of practice

Studying Shakespeare in the high school classroom can and sometimes should begin with images and film. In Reading Shakespeare Film First, Mary Ellen Dakin asserts that we need to read Shakespeare in triplicate—as the stuff of transformative literature, theater, and film. 

The potential for the mutual reinforcement and transfer of twenty-first-century literacy skills between text and film is too promising for classroom teachers to overlook. The heart of this book is a triangle whose three points are literary, theatrical, and cinematic; the chapters map a route around the perimeter of the triangle, guiding teachers and students with carefully researched and classroom-tested strategies for crossing over from Shakespeare’s rich and strange early modern English to equally rich and strange modern film and illustrated productions of his plays. 

Along the way, readers engage in reading and analyzing film stills, movie posters, and book covers; recognizing the three faces of film: literary, theatrical, and cinematic; exploring in depth the theatrical and cinematic elements of Shakespeare and then reconnecting them to the text; reading Shakespeare in full-length films; and transmediating Shakespeare's scripts into theater and film. As the “old” language of Shakespeare is constantly renewed through the “new” language of film, students develop twenty-first-century literacy skills through a marriage of the two.

Reframing the Relational examines how writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines communicate with each other in face-to-face conversations about teaching writing. 

Sandra L. Tarabochia argues that a pedagogical approach to faculty interactions in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) contexts can enhance cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration and ultimately lead to more productive, sustainable initiatives. Theorizing pedagogy as an epistemic, reflexive, relational activity among teacher-learners, she uses a pedagogical framework to analyze conversations between writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines, drawing on transcripts from interviews and recorded conversations. 

The author identifies the discursive moves faculty used to navigate three communicative challenges or opportunities: negotiating expertise, orienting to change, and embracing play. Based on this analysis, she constructs a pedagogical ethic for WAC/WID work and shows how it can help faculty embrace the potential of cross-disciplinary communication.

Building upon the 2018 Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature position statement, Restorying Young Adult Literature spotlights how both teachers and students are using digital tools and technologies to re-read, re-write, and restory YAL today. 

Primarily, this text provides pedagogical approaches and resources for English language arts (ELA) educators to integrate shifts in textuality and the availability of participatory digital networks into their classroom. We propose Digital YAL and Digital YA Culture as conceptual tools for teachers to learn from the digital restorying practices of young people and fellow educators, and across the book, we demonstrate how teachers can restory text selection, digital access, white curricula, and multimodality in their classroom, doing so in pursuit of more just teaching and learning for today’s digital era.

At the heart of Rethinking the “Adolescent” in Adolescent Literacy is a call to English language arts teachers to examine the very assumptions of adolescence they may be operating from in order to reimagine new possibilities for engaging students with the English curriculum. 

Relying on a sociocultural view of adolescence established by scholars in critical youth studies, the book focuses on classrooms from diverse contexts to explain adolescence as a construct and how this perspective of youth can encourage educators to re-envision literacy instruction and learning. Working from and looking beyond Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief, the authors explore the “myth” of adolescence and the possibility of a curriculum that positions youth as experts and knowledgeable advocates fully engaged in their own learning.

Rhetorical Ecologies invites you on a transformative journey through the history of writing and rhetoric studies’ adoption of ecology, situating this history in rich discussions about: 

• the potential that ecology holds for rhetoric and writing studies; 
• the untapped potential of ecology in fostering inclusive, equitable, and justice-oriented approaches to rhetorical inquiry; and  
• the diverse and dynamic nature of rhetoric ecologies.  

Rhetorics of Overcoming addresses the in/accessibility of writing classroom and writing center practices for disabled and nondisabled student writers, exploring how rhetorics of overcoming—the idea that disabled students must overcome their disabilities in order to be successful—manifest in writing studies scholarship and practices.

Allison Harper Hitt argues that rewriting rhetorics of overcoming as narratives of “coming over” is one way to overcome ableist pedagogical standards. Whereas rhetorics of overcoming rely on medical-model processes of diagnosis, disclosure, cure, and overcoming for individual students, coming over involves valuing disability and difference and challenging systemic issues of physical and pedagogical inaccessibility. 

Hitt calls for developing understandings of disability and difference that move beyond accommodation models in which students are diagnosed and remediated, instead working collaboratively—with instructors, administrators, consultants, and students themselves—to craft multimodal, universally designed writing pedagogies that meet students’ access needs.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series:

In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Edited by Tom Liam Lynch, this collection of essays drawn from NCTE’s many journals provides an excellent starting point for teachers who want to bring critical media literacy into their K-12 and college classrooms.

Critical media literacy is not a single star burning brightly in the night sky. It is more like a constellation, a collection of stars that tell a story about how educators engage with young people through an array of communicative modes in the spirit of inquiry, society, and action. 

About the Special Issue series:

Most teachers and students across the country are grappling with several important issues. We hear from many educators who are looking for compelling and engaging approaches racial literacy, critical media literacy, and trauma-informed teaching. 

NCTE is responding to these needs with Special Issues, a series of books designed to directly address these pressing topics in K-12 and college classrooms today. The first volumes collect content on these topics from across all of NCTE’s journals in one place, to make the most relevant material accessible and practical. 

Edited by expert practitioners in the field, each volume contains teaching tips to help implement these approaches in classrooms. 

This first volume of Special Issues: Trauma-Informed Teaching gathers some of the most compelling and practical recent articles across NCTE journals, addressing the importance of trauma-informed teaching and its recent developments in the field.

We live in a time that requires attention to trauma. Educators and students are learning how to move forward in this precarious time, which in many ways has amplified preexisting health, racial, economic, and educational inequalities. The pandemic has shaped us in ways we have yet to understand fully, but we know we must adapt and heal together. It is imperative that K-College educators not only consider trauma-informed teaching, but also healing-centered teaching practices. As we think through ways to support the most harmed people in our teaching and learning communities, we will move closer to a more equitable and just healing-centered profession.

Editor Sakeena Everett has curated this collection to show how to help K-College teachers integrate the most up-to-date approaches to trauma-informed teaching into their classroom environments. In this volume, you will find valuable insights, diverse perspectives, innovative and exciting pedagogies, as well as thought-provoking research methodologies that engage micro- and macro-level supports you need to get started today.

About the Special Issue series:

Most teachers and students across the country are grappling with several important issues. We hear from many educators who are looking for compelling and engaging approaches racial literacy, critical media literacy, and trauma-informed teaching. 

NCTE is responding to these needs with Special Issues, a series of books designed to directly address these pressing topics in K-12 and college classrooms today. The first volumes collect content on these topics from across all of NCTE’s journals in one place, to make the most relevant material accessible and practical. 

Edited by expert practitioners in the field, each volume contains teaching tips to help implement these approaches in classrooms.

Winner of the 2021 Association for Writing Across the Curriculum/WAC Clearinghouse award for Best WAC Monograph

A 2008 survey of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs found that nearly half of those identified in a 1987 survey no longer existed twenty years later, pointing to a need for an approach to WAC administration that leads to programs that persist over time. In Sustainable WAC, current or former WAC program directors Michelle Cox, Jeffrey R. Galin, and Dan Melzer introduce a theoretical framework for WAC program development that takes into account the diverse contexts of today's institutions of higher education, aids WAC program directors in thinking strategically as they develop programs, and integrates a focus on program sustainability. 

Informed by theories that illuminate transformative change within systems—complexity, systems, social network, resilience, and sustainable development theories—and illustrated with vignettes by WAC directors across the country, this book lays out principles, strategies, and tactics to help WAC program directors launch, relaunch, or reinvigorate programs within the complicated systems of today’s colleges and universities. Acknowledging that every WAC program grows out of a specific institutional context and grassroots movement, this book is a must-read for everyone currently involved in a WAC program or interested in exploring the possibility of one at their college or university.

Recipient of the 2025 Divergent Award for Excellence in Literacy in a Digital Age Research Publication

Teaching Literacy Online is a practical guide for secondary and college teachers of English in digital and online environments. Like other, practical, “how to teach online” books, TLO includes an overview of good practices and guidelines for teaching in digital environments. However, it goes further, by providing detailed suggestions and examples to model good digital teaching practices. You’ll learn how to apply the online teaching guidelines through:

• Digital organization;
• Engagement with materials;
• Analysis and synthesis of information; and
• The production of texts in a multitude of media and modalities.

By focusing on the engagement, analysis, and production of texts, TLO positions literacy pedagogy as the driving force when making decisions about how to teach online and/or with different digital applications.