Chapter 9: Writing as Capital: The Emancipatory Act of Writing for Profit, Advocacy, and Charity

Context Writing is an agentive act. Despite drastic improvements over the past few decades in writing instruction and the push for sharing with authentic audiences, the majority of writing students do is still for the teacher. These practices are at odds with those who advocate for classrooms that are culturally relevant, culturally responsive, and culturally sustaining. When students write for the sole purpose of “doing school,” they are denied opportunities to use their writing voices to write about, for, and within their communities. Writing is used to empower—to pose problems and solve them. The distribution of that writing is equally important. Publication matters. It is in the distribution and response to writing that one can experience the power of written words to impact one's world. Purpose In this chapter, we outline authentic purposes for writing centered on culturally relevant, responsive, agentive, and sustaining pedagogies. We describe the writer's workshop, an instructional structure in which to embed these pedagogies. The writer's workshop is the setting in which these students were situated to write purposefully. We take the reader into three classrooms using descriptive vignettes. The three classroom vignettes presented frame emancipatory writing for (a) personal profit to reinforce the value—monetary and social—of using one's intellectual skills and written words for personal gain; (b) advocacy—through fostering critical consciousness that explores equitable and just familial structures and relationships and monetizing written words to directly impact a family through adoption; and (c) charity—through a service-learning project in which students used writing to influence others to financially support a charity that helps people who have been impacted by oppression in the forms of kidnapping, trafficking, and modern-day slavery. Research Design This is a narrative accounting of three teachers’ experience implementing this practice in their own classrooms. Conclusions In all three instances, children were agents who wrote for monetary motivation— seeking and acquiring capital for themselves, for others, or to effect desired social change. Moreover, the outcomes were achieved by students who used their skills and worked within their capacities to meaningfully effect change. Suggestions for implementation and generalization are offered.

How to Teach Writing Effectively in a Virtual Environment

This chapter focuses on the challenge that many general educators face when they transition into the virtual learning environment. Even talented writing teachers struggle to shift their regular teaching practices to fit the format of online instruction. The author will address some of the pitfalls of stepping into the virtual world and then focus on the best practices for virtual writing instruction, including this author's recommended program, The Writer's Workshop by Lucy Calkins. The chapter will offer some tangible strategies for any virtual educator to teach writing in their subject area. It will also address essential contributors to student learning, like fostering a classroom culture online, assessing students, and working with struggling writers. While the virtual education field is forever evolving, teachers can benefit from practicing these strategies, as well as continuing to focus on professional development and growth in order to grow themselves and their student writers effectively.

Iowa Writer's Workshop

The Program Era Project (PEP) has assembled three related datasets of information on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW). The first two datasets include the thesis and matriculation records of the IWW from the first creative thesis submitted in 1941 until Spring 2014. These data were initially derived from University of Iowa Library catalog records of MFA theses. Additional data (primarily genre and advisor) were filled in by checking bound copies of theses held in the University Archives. Also included are small number (~1.5% of total) of BA records from other institutions for early faculty and additional degrees earned at Iowa by IWW grads and faculty (e.g., several IWW graduates also have Nonfiction Writing Program MFAs).