Alexander Motyl, Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University — Newark A colleague from Kyiv, Ukraine, whom I’ll call N.M., sent me brief essays her students wrote on what they would do when the war ends. …

by Tom Fox, National Writing Project Imagine my surprise at being half-way around the world to visit my son and getting a message in the Write Now Teacher Studio from Jeff Gibbs, introducing himself as Director of the Hisar Writing Center, having heard I was in town. …

The Russian invasion of Ukraine — Most Americans have come to agree that attention to news and media literacy is an important part of our curricula in a digital world; the questions often turn to leisurely discussions of How much, when? What kind? and Whose job? Events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine—much like the…

By Derek H. Alderman, Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee, and Joshua F.J. Inwood, Associate Professor of Geography and Senior Research Associate in the Rock Ethics Institute, Penn State How can maps fight racism and inequality? The work of the Black Panther Party, a 1960s- and 1970s-era Black political group featured in a new movie and a…

Three scholars of poetry explain why the writings of Amanda Gorman represent a prime opportunity for educators to use spoken word poetry to engage students. — By Kathleen M. Alley, Associate Professor of Literacy, Mississippi State University; Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Associate Professor of literatures in English, Cornell University; and Wendy R. Williams, Assistant Professor of English, Arizona State University

By Lindsay Pérez Huber, Associate Professor, College of Education , California State University, Long Beach Ten years ago, I sat down with my then 8-year-old daughter to read a book before bedtime. The book was sort of a modern-day “boy who cried wolf” story, only it was about a little…

Mike Rose, the author/scholar/professor and living example of a fundamentally decent and humane academic, died August 15, 2021. He was 77. — Did I write ‘living example’? Since the news broke, I still can’t believe it’s true. We lose a great many founding figures and great minds in literacy education every year, but Mike occupied a special place in the National Writing Project. He was a teacher and scholar of writing who…

by Raphael E. Rogers, Professor of Practice, Clark University Nervous. Concerned. Worried. Wary. Unprepared. This is how middle and high school teachers have told me they have felt over the past few years when it comes to teaching the troublesome topic of slavery. Although I work with teachers in Massachusetts…

by Joel Christensen, Professor of Classical Studies, Brandeis University In the ancient Greek epic “The Odyssey,” Homer’s hero, Odysseus, describes the wild land of the Cyclops as a place where people don’t gather together in public, where each person makes decisions for their own family and “care nothing for one…