Multilingual Approaches Toward English Prose
2022 Bechtel Prize Winner Shilpi Suneja’s students make language their subject. “The dominance of English is a lie we tell ourselves.”
Art of Teaching Writing
Articles, essays, editorials, and meditations on T&W’s mission, “educating the imagination.”
See complete submission guidelines here.
Writing from the Other End: Creative Growth with Kostas Anagnopoulos
Everyone’s voice merged into one poem, so it was not only a site of writing but also community, listening, and being heard.
Reading and Critiquing Trauma Memoirs
“Her words and experiences triggered me over and over again. I wasn’t ready to face my own demons. How could I possibly read and critique a memoir about hers?”
Serious Lightness: A Profile of Teaching Artist Joanna Fuhrman
“When you are teaching creative writing, you always get students to start with the idea that a poem creates a picture with words. It doesn’t only have to be a picture you see; it also can be something you smell and hear and taste. A poem is an experience of the world. That is true no matter what grade a student is in.”
The B+ Student: On Balance, Brevity, and Powder Days
Everybody thinks teachers want all their students to get As. And, of course, we are happy when they do. But as a human being who is also a teacher, you can’t help but hope for more for your students.
Giving the Writer Permission to Play: An Essay in Four Acts
By Judith Chriqui Benchimol ACT I When my sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Fine assigned an essay on Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace,” I panicked. I didn’t understand the essay prompt or know how to structure my response to her questions. I couldn’t think the way Mrs. Fine wanted me to think. I wrote in…
Because Your Liberation Is Bound Up With Mine: Introducing the 2021 PEN America / L’Engle Rahman Mentorship Prize Recipients
In this special feature T&W is pleased to recognize the important work of those involved with the PEN program, whose belief in the power and purpose of writing mirrors our own, and to introduce the winners of PEN America’s newly established L’Engle Rahman Award for Mentorship.
Superheroic Delight Songs: A Poetry-Inspired Mural at Lea Elementary in West Philly
I started this “poetry-mural” initiative back in the spring of 2017 while working as a writer-in-residence at PS 51 in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. The school building was already brimming with color and creativity, thanks in large part to the collaborative spirit of the art teacher, Shani Perez, and the principal, Nancy Sing-Bock.
Breaking Through with Poetry: The Teacher as Writer
“For teachers as much as for students, writing gives us all an invitation to lift ourselves above our seemingly ordinary desk jobs, classrooms, bedroom windows, or small towns. It grants us permission.”
QuaranTeen
In the summers of 2020 and 2021, Teachers & Writers Collaborative offered a poetry writing workshop to teachers with the goal of providing them with an immersive creative experience while modeling lessons they could take into their ELA classrooms. The QuaranTeen video was a project of one of the participants in the 2020 workshop. By…