Articles, essays, editorials, and meditations on T&W’s mission, “educating the imagination.”
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by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor As a professor of language and literacy education as well as a poet, it has long been my goal to train educators to be teaching artists in the classroom, able to engage in creative and playful approaches to curriculum and instruction in languages, literatures, and creative writing. In 2017 I had the…
by Sydney Lumbreras Clifton Teaching world languages in middle school is a job that requires focus, energy, and creativity. Over the last five years of learning how to be an educator, I have used my creative mind in ways I never would have imagined as a young artist. That being said, the scope of creativity…
by Cynthia Amoah On a damp Friday afternoon, the rain spills itself onto umbrellas suspended in the air, making a mess of everything the way it does. Hip-hop blares from car speakers and the aroma of the good, good spices of a local Jamaican restaurant drifts onto the street. The High School for Contemporary Arts…
by Ethan Victor At Bronx Park Middle School (BPMS) in the East Bronx, students are encouraged to communicate and be creative. Aided by teaching artists and using exploratory and alternative styles of thinking and lesson plans to support writing with imagery and vision, students are pushed toward developing writing skills. This emphasis directly follows Bronx…
by Brittany R. Collins Midway down a nursing home corridor, past the cafeteria and behind a cloth room divider, lay Alexander Vanderburgh Jr., aged eighty-six and counting. Alex was a residential dementia patient and the father of my friend, Ann. He liked math, mountains, and chocolate chip ice cream, the latter of which I carried…
Bridging Borders with Words: Writing with Immigrant and Refugee Students In this sixth piece in our series on working with immigrant and refugee writers, Jan-Henry Gray draws on his own experience as an undocumented student to offer advice to educators. Related content includes One Day You Will Be One of the Happier: The Voices and…
by Amy C. Evans Move during HarveyHad to drive out of HoustonLeave home to get safe—Haiku by Jy’lon, 6th grade Since the 2016 presidential election, Houston, Texas, has been in an almost fugue state of resistance and recovery. Nowhere is this more evident than in our classrooms. As a circuit teacher of sorts, with multiple…
by Jason Koo The following is an excerpt from Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry, a new book from Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Edited by Matthew Burgess, Spellbound offers a range of exciting ideas to inspire students of all ages to explore their potential as writers and creators. I got the idea for this assignment from Ed Hirsch, the…
Bridging Borders with Words: Writing with Immigrant and Refugee Students This article is part of a series in Teachers & Writers Magazine on working with immigrant and refugee writers. Related content includes One Day You Will Be One of the Happier: The Voices and Poetry of Teen Immigrants, Two Poetry Prompts to Inspire Immigrant…
by Lex Talamo I moved to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 2009 as a naïve 22-year-old teacher, with high hopes and big plans to instill my love of writing in my 80 incoming middle school students. My principal informed me there was no formal writing curriculum—I would have to create one from scratch….