The Genres of 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 forthcoming 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 has 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.

Writing and Art

Joni Chancer

Joni Chancer, who teaches fourth grade at Montecito Union School and serves as a SCWriP Co-Director, has been a Fellow and teacher-leader of SCWriP for over 20 years. As one of this country's most influential teacher-educators, she is known for her widely used book for teachers, Moon Journals (Heinemann-Boynton/Cook) and for her popular professional development workshops. She is also a teacher-researcher in her own classroom and the recipient of the National Writing Project's prestigious Fred Hechinger Award. The award recognizes an exemplary teacher-leader who has made important contributions to professional knowledge through research and the application of research to teaching. Joni conducts numerous workshops for SCWriP, including Writing and Art summer workshop tours to such locations as Italy and France.

Writing and Social Justice

Linda Christensen

Linda Christensen is the author of Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching about Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word and co-editor of Rethinking School Reform: Views from the Classroom. For the last thirty years, she has taught high school English and worked as Language Arts Curriculum Specialist in Portland, Oregon. She is currently the Director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis & Clark. She is a member of the editorial board of the influential progressive educational journal, Rethinking Schools, and is a founding member of the National Coalition of Education Activists. In 1998 she was the recipient of the prestigious Fred Hechinger Award for use of research in teaching and writing, awarded by the National Writing Project. She was also named by US West magazine as  the “Outstanding Teacher of the Western United States” for her published article, “Reaching Beyond Classroom Walls”.

"Mi hija, you should be a writer"

Jessica Singer Early

Jessica Singer taught high school English for several years in Portland, Oregon, where she was also an active member of Portland Rethinking Schools, an activist organization committed to making progressive change in public education. Her teaching and her work as a social activist in Portland  is reflected in her first book, Stirring Up Justice: Writing and Reading to Change the World (Heinemann, 2006). For the past five years she has been a doctoral student in English education at UCSB, where she has been teaching in the UCSB Writing Program and completing her dissertation on Chicano students who are highly accomplished college writers. In the course of her doctoral work she has published several scholarly articles and presented her research at a number of national professional conferences. Jessie will receive her PhD in June and will then move to Arizona where she has been appointed an Assistant Professor in English Education at Arizona State University.

Genres for Student Publication

Erick Gordon

Erick Gordon is the director of the Student Press Initiative at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he is also an instructor in the Teaching of English Program. His seven years of teaching experience at the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Education along with his previous experience for four years as a small press publisher earned him an expertise in classroom publishing projects that has become the cornerstone of the Student Press Initiative (SPI), a professional development organization of Teachers College. His approach to curriculum-based publication ensures that all students publish their work. And in the SPI model, publication is not just the final step of the writing process; it is a recursive idea that offers an opportunity to explore the relationship between writer, genre, and audience. Innovative and highly specific genre studies result from what has been referred to as audience-driven work. "Best-of" reviews written by eighth graders, profiles of social activists by high school seniors, and a multimedia collection of “Shakespearian hip-hop,” by tenth graders are just some of the books published by and for students and their communities. A growing number of these books are being used in classrooms across the country as primary texts. Together with Ruth Vinz, Eric co-authored Becoming (Other)wise: Enhancing Critical Reading Perspectives.

Analyzing and Writing Arguments

George Hillocks

George Hillocks is Professor of English (emeritus) at the University of Chicago, where for many years he headed the MAT program in English and the English education doctoral program, and served as the mentor for many of the most productive researchers presently publishing in the field of English education. As a researcher in English education he is also the mentor and exemplar for the entire field. His half a dozen books have shaped theory and have had a profound influence on practice in the teaching of writing, literature, critical thinking, and in the assessment of student performance in the language arts. He has won most of the major research awards available in the fields of English education and English studies, including the most prestigious David Russell Award. His most recent influential books include the now classic, Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice (1995), and The Testing Trap: How State Writing Assessments Control Learning (2002). His most recent book, on the teaching of narrative is forthcoming from Heinemann later this year. A book written by his former students and intellectual heirs, celebrating and documenting his powerful influence on theory and practice in English education was recently published by Heinemann under the title Reflective Teaching, Reflective Learning: How to Develop Critically Engaged Readers.

Teaching Writing in A Studio Workshop

Dan Kirby & Dawn Latta Kirby

Dan Kirby is widely appreciated for his highly influential and groundbreaking books on the teaching of writing and thinking and for his intellectual leadership in the field of English education. His books include Inside Out, (3rd ed. 2004), Mind Matters (1991) and most recently (with Dawn Latta Kirby) New Directions in Teaching Memoir (2007). A former high school English teacher, Dan recently retired after more than thirty years of university teaching at the University of Georgia, the University of Central Florida, the University of Arizona, and the University of Colorado at Denver. His recent book on memoir developed out of teaching experiments he conducted at UCSB in the late 80s, when he was a Visiting Professor in the UCSB Writing Program.

Dawn Latta Kirby is the coauthor of New Directions in Teaching Memoir (2007) and Inside Out, Third Edition (2004). A former high school English teacher as well as a department chair, she taught college classes in English methods, young adult literature, qualitative research methods, and writing in Colorado, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arizona. She is currently Professor of English and English Education at Kennesaw State University, where she directs the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project.

Research on Error in Student Writing

Karen Lunsford

Karen Lunsford is Assistant Professor of Writing in the UCSB Writing Program and a faculty member 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 the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. Her research employs interdisciplinary approaches to understand 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.

Academic Genres for Young Writers

Suzie Null & Matt McCaffrey

Suzie Null is a Ph.D. candidate at UCSB, with a research focus in writing instruction and curricula.  She has taught 8th grade Language Arts and then high school English classes for five years while she was living in Boulder, Colorado.  She earned an MA in Creative Writing from CU-Boulder in 1997, an MA in Education at UCSB in 2007, and was a Colorado Writing Project participant in 2001 and was a South Coast Writing Project Fellow in 2005.  At UCSB, she has taught writing courses and currently teaches for the Teacher Education Program.

Matt McCaffrey teaches at La Cuesta Continuation High School and previously taught at Santa Barbara High School for 5 years. While he teaches, he is also pursuing his Ph.D. in Education at UCSB.  In addition to being both a teacher and student, he has also competed in triathalons.  He was a South Coast Writing Project Fellow in 2005.

The Reading-Writing Connection

Carol Olson

Carol Olson is Director of the UC Irvine Writing Project and a member of the faculty at UC Irvine. She is well-known for the numerous advanced institutes her project has conducted for teacher-consultants from the UCI Writing Project and other NWP sites on such topics as Writing and Critical Thinking and The Teaching of Multicultural Literature. 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 most recent book is called The Reading/Writing Connection (Allyn and Bacon, 2002).

Becoming a Writer

Amada Irma Perez

Amada Irma Perez taught elementary grades in Oxnard for twenty years before coning to the SCWriP Summer Institute of 1998. She then became a SCWriP teacher-consultant and has for the past several years conducted inservice workshops sponsored by SCWriP and served as a lead teacher in SCWriP Young Writers Camps in Ventura County.  Through her participation as a Fellow of the SCWriP Summer Institute of 1998, Ms. Perez also found her opportunity she had longed dreamed of to become a write. During that summer   she completed the first draft of what became her first published book, My Very Own Room/Mi Propio Cuartito, a prize-winning bi-lingual children's book.  This was soon followed by My Diary from Here to There/Mi Diario De Aqui Hasta Alla, another bi-lingual book that has garnered additional literary prizes for its author. Her third bi-lingual book, Nana's Chicken Coop Surprise/Nana, Que Sorpresa will be coming out in Fall 2007. She is also currently at work on a book of poems for children and a novel for adult readers. Amada Irma is now a widely celebrated author who travels all over America and abroad inspiring children and teachers with her books and with her personal story as an immigrant from Mexico, who entered school not speaking a word of English and overcame the obstacles of severe poverty to become a successful classroom teacher and internationally celebrated author of books for children.

Teaching Chicano Studies at UCSB

Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval

Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval is a professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. His research and teaching interests include globalization, labor, political economy, social movements, Latin American studies ( Mexico and Central America), race relations, critical urban studies, and Marxism. His book on sweatshops and labor organizing in Central America and the US, Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas (Routledge), appeared in 2004.

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 nine volumes of poetry over the past 30 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 25 years he has been a frequent and much-loved visitor at Writing Projects throughout California and in many K-12 classrooms.

Disciplinary Writing

Patti Stock

Patti Stock was a high school English teacher for many years before completing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan, where she gained a national reputation as one of the chief architects of the University’s English Composition Board and as the editor of the influential journal of composition studies, Forum. She served for several years as an Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the prestigious Writing Program at the University of Syracuse. She is Professor of English and Education, emerita, at Michigan State University, where she was the founding Director of the Red Cedar Writing Project, and she is also Professor of Education at the University of Maryland, where she directs the Maryland Writing Project. She is also the former editor of NCTE’s journal, English Education, and is the author of influential and award-winning articles and books on the teaching and learning of writing and on the professional lives of teachers. Her most influential books include The Dialogic Curriculum (Heinemann, 1995) and Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education (NCTE, 2001). She is a former President of NCTE (2003-04) and is one of the nation’s leading advocates and explicators of a theory and practice for the “scholarship of teaching.” She is presently conducting a major research project on how the scholarship of teaching is enacted in the National Writing Project.