The Journal of Teaching Writing

I chose to review the Journal of Teaching Writing because I feel that the research in this field is not as well known nor respected as the scholarship being done in the areas of literary criticism, reading theory, and literacy. If teaching English is undervalued in academia, and teaching writing is even more looked down upon by people in our field, then research on teaching writing is probably at the bottom of the heap. Despite this stigma, the Journal of Teaching Writing seeks to provide practical, applicable, and well thought-out studies for teachers of writing at all grade levels.

The Journal of Teaching Writing is published by the organization Indiana Teachers of Writing, based at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. It comes out twice a year, although in recent years, both issues have been combined into a single print copy. From my research, the journal can only be accessed via print; subscriptions are $20 for individuals and $25 for institutions. Currently, it does not appear on the list of electronic subscriptions for the University of Arkansas, MLA Bibliography, JSTOR, ProQuest, or Project Muse. Moreover, the journal’s website, http://www.iupui.edu/~jtw/, claims to be under construction, but the cached page from earlier this month had not been updated since 2005. Certainly, if the journal wishes to be relevant to 21st century readers, the ITW should increase the Journal of Teaching Writing’s presence on the internet.

The question of teacher access to the journal is a particularly salient one, since the journal’s editorial policy states that it “publishes articles of interest to teachers at all grade levels, from preschool through university.” However, the majority of the journal’s articles are written about teaching writing at universities. Some articles address teaching of writing at the high school level, but even those articles tend to address the gap between high school writing and college writing, rather than considering high school writing by itself. According to their website, the Indiana Teachers of Writing organization was founded by a group of teachers at the College English Association conference, so perhaps the inclusiveness of the journal has been a consistent project for the journal rather than a statement of its demographics. Due to the policy’s inclusion of all teachers of writing, from teachers of preschool to graduate school, the authors in the Journal of Teaching Writing tend to write articles that are practical in nature rather than theoretical. Most articles are heavily grounded in what actually happens in the classroom and include examples of assignments and student work.

In the three volumes I read (2008, 2004, and 2002 – the most recent ones available at our library), the journal’s “center of gravity” appears to be twofold: first, the role of the teacher’s authority in the classroom, and second, students’ entrance into an academic community and the subsequent identity shifts occurring as students adapt to new or different roles as writers. The first center of gravity is not too surprising, since most recent research in the field favors finding ways for students to accept authority for their own written works. In the 2002 volume, participants consider new roles for teachers in a decentered classroom (“Better Writing Through Apprenticeship Learning: Helping to Solve the Ill-Structured Problem” and “Reconfiguring Donald’s Ladder: A New Image for the Thinking About Reflective Practice in Writing Instruction”), and in the fall 2008 issue, authors examine how students perceive authority through grading (“Grading as a Process Toward Growth: Deferring Grades on Writing Assignments” and “Lessons Learned: High Stakes Writing Tests Shape Teaching and Students’ Attitude and Achievement”). I imagine that this information would be useful to many teachers because theoretically many of us agree with the principles of a decentered classroom, but we sometimes have difficulty putting those theories into action. Additionally, some of the articles also note student resistance to the paradigm, a problem I have occasionally encountered in my own teaching.

I suspect that student resistance to authority in the classroom may also inform the journal’s examination of its second center of gravity, how students adapt to the role of an academic writer. The fall 2008 issue explores how students enter academic literacy (“A Scholarly Project: Film as an Introductory Academic Literacy” and “A Case Study of Reading in a Writing-Intensive Physics Course for Non-Majors “), and the 2004 and 2002 volumes consider the types of written projects that teachers could include in a linguistically diverse classroom (“The American Scholar Writes the ‘New’ Research Essay,” “Teaching Writing as Story,” “Writing with an Accent: A Marginal Multi-lingual Voice Seeking a Place in Academe,” and “Write about Ebonics: A Composition Course at the University of Akron,” just to name a few). While I think that the journal’s focus on widening the scope of academic reading and writing is a move in the right direction, I wonder how a teacher should position herself as an authority in such a classroom – a nod to the first center of gravity in the journal. If we teach the conventions of academia to students who have not necessarily been exposed to them – and thus provide a connection between their lives and the type of academic work they are asked to do in school - do we inevitably blur the line between our authority and our knowledge of academic conventions? Is there a practical way to establish a classroom environment in which students can make the transition between non-academic writer and academic writer without allying yourself with the academic institution? And would such a move be ethically and pedagogically sound?