Articles, essays, editorials, and meditations on T&W’s mission, “educating the imagination.”
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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….
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. Other pieces includeSusan Karwoska’s interviews with and poems written by high school students recently arrived in the US, Sarah Dohrmann’s poetry lesson plans for engaging immigrant…
by Aracelis Girmay 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. Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947,…
by Sally Ventura This essay is adapted from Sally Ventura’s keynote speech at the 2018 New York State English Council Conference. One day, a student in one of my English 11 classes arrived just a minute or two after the bell. I was standing at my podium, reviewing the day’s plans in the way that…