Academic Writing

Charles Bazerman

Charles Bazerman is one of the world’s leading scholars on writing-across-the-curriculum, writing in the academic community, and genre theory. He is widely regarded as the leading American authority on research methodology and the history of research in composition, and is the senior editor of the monumental Encyclopedia of Research in Composition and Rhetoric. His award-winning book, Shaping Written Knowledge: the Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (1988), is regarded as a seminal study by scholars throughout the world. His more recent books include The Languages of Edison’s Light (1999), a study of how intersecting discourses foster and produce new knowledge; and Constructing Experience, a collection of influential articles he had written over a period of twenty years on the teaching and learning of writing and on problematic issues in rhetoric and composition. He is also the author of a widely used Freshman English textbook, The Informed Writer, and a series of textbooks for basic skills students under the general title of English Skills Handbook. He began his teaching career as a primary grades teacher in Brooklyn, NY. Later, he served for many years as Professor of English at Baruch College and, more recently, Professor of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is presently Professor of Education at UCSB and is the outgoing Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the major professional association in the field of composition studies.

Assessing Writing

Tim Dewar

Tim Dewar, a veteran of 15 years teaching in high school classrooms, is a former co-director of SCWriP and former supervisor of teacher education in English in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UCSB. A Fellow and teacher-leader of SCWriP since 1994, Tim participated in numerous SCWriP advanced institutes, and served for many years as a widely valued presenter, classroom coach, and coordinator for SCWriP inservice programs in schools.  He is also a former member of the California Writing Project’s Institute for the Study of Academic Writing and served for two years as the coordinator for a major research project, sponsored by the National Writing Project to assess the impact of SCWriP inservice programs in schools. After receiving his PhD in English education from UCSB, Tim joined the faculty in the department of education at the State University of New York, in New Paltz, NY, where he is an Assistant Professor, teaching courses in English education and serving as a co-director of the Hudson Valley Writing Project. He is a specialist in the teaching and assessment of writing, in research on classroom practices, and in the professional development of teachers of English and the language arts.

Intellectual Scaffolds for Academic Writing

Laury Fischer

Laury Fischer taught high school English for many years, before he accepted a position as a Professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California, where he has been teaching for the past decade and a half, and where he served an extended term as Chair of the Department of English. In the decade between his high school and college teaching appointments he served as Co-director of the Bay Area Writing Project and a widely influential leader of the National Writing Project. As an exemplary teacher-consultant of BAWP for many years before as well as after his tenure as Co-director, he has conducted inservice programs in schools and colleges throughout the Bay Area and for secondary and college teachers of English across the country and at a number of sites in Europe and Asia. His legendary presentations on the teaching of writing serve as a model for the next generation of NWP teacher-consultants and demonstrate how the genre of the professional workshop is a powerful example of the scholarship of teaching and an influential form of professional publication.

Deep Reading & Writing

Kelly Gallagher

The National Study of Student Writing Errors

Karen Lunsford

Karen Lunsford is Associate Professor of Writing in the UCSB Writing Program and in the program in Language, Literacy and Composition in the Department of Education. Her publications include articles in Written Communication, Computers and the Humanities, and Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and College Composition and Communication, where she published (with Andrea Lunsford) a widely cited study of the common errors found in the writing of college freshman. Her major research agenda employs interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the writing practices that people engage in within evolving knowledge ecologies, how argumentation is situated within those ecologies, and what roles technologies play in these contexts.

Strategies for Academic Success in Writing about Reading

Carol Olson

Carol Olson (Ph.D in English, UCLA) is Director of the UC Irvine Writing Project and a member of the faculty in the department of education at UC Irvine. Under her intellectual and editorial leadership her project has published several books that have had a widespread influence on the teaching of the English Language Arts. These include Practical Ideas for Teaching Writing as a Process (Calif. Dept. of Ed.), Fostering Critical Thinking Through Writing (Harper & Collins), and Reading, Thinking, and Writing About Culturally Diverse Literature (UC Irvine). Her own research on her project’s inservice work with school districts in her region has been published in the prestigious journal, Research in the Teaching of English and won her the Alan Purves award for research of most importance to the field of practice in the English language arts.  Her widely used book, The Reading/Writing Connection (Allyn and Bacon) was initially published in 2002 and has been re-issued in a new edition for 2008. 

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz is Assistant Professor in the English Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Prior to coming to Teachers College, she was Research Associate with New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Urban Education and professor of English at Kingsborough Community College (CUNY). She has taught undergraduate and graduate education courses at New York University, and high school journalism and multicultural literature in New York City schools. She worked as a freelance writer for Columbia’s African American Studies department, Scholastic Inc, and urban after school programs. Dr. Sealey-Ruiz’s research interests include race in education, urban teacher preparation, culturally relevant pedagogy, the educational trajectories of reentry Black women, and the achievement gap. Her articles have appeared in Kappa Delta Pi’s Educational Forum, The Journal of Negro Education, Adult Education Quarterly and the Willa Journal (NCTE) to name a few. She is a Fellow of the New York City National Writing Project.

Writing Poetry

Barry Spacks

Barry Spacks, now retired from his long-term position as Professor of Literature at M.I.T., has taught in recent years at the University of Kentucky, UC Berkeley, and UCSB. In 1980 he served as a writer-in-residence in SCWriP's second Summer Institute in Composition and he has returned every summer since to conduct a workshop in writing poetry.  He has published two novels, a collection of short stories, and a dozen volumes of poetry over the past 40 years, including a volume called Spacks Street, a collection of selected poems published by Johns Hopkins University Press. His poems have also appeared in every important American journal of poetry and in many anthologies of leading American poets. Over the past 30 years he has been a frequent and much-loved visitor at Writing Projects throughout California and in many K-12 classrooms.