Writing and the iGeneration:  Composition in the Computer-Mediated Classroom

The third book in the Fountainhead Press X Series for Professional Development.   Writing and the iGeneration: Composition in the Computer-Mediated Classroom provides selections that range from how to use technology to build a community of writers to integrating and shaping electronic locations for effective writing. The essays provided guide both new and experienced teachers in incorporating technology into their teaching of writing, but will do so with the principle that students and their writing come first.

Fountainhead Press is pleased to introduce (E)Merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center, the second book in the Fountainhead Press X Series for Professional Development.

(E)Merging Identities provides an overview of the challenges and rewards that await graduate student clients, tutors, and administrators in the writing center. The text is intended as a resource not only for graduate students but also for faculty and writing center professionals who work with them. Whether used as a classroom text or a professional development resource, (E)Merging Identities provides an opening for sustained conversations about theorizing the work graduate students do in the center as well as highlights the professional, academic, and personal stakes for graduate students in this environment.

Authors in this collection address such questions as: How do graduate students navigate through the complicated work of being tutors and teachers, often simultaneously? What are the benefits and drawbacks of working in and doing research on writing centers as a graduate student? And what is the nature of the relationship between a graduate tutor and graduate and/or undergraduate clients?

Fountainhead Press is pleased to introduce COMPbiblio, the first book in the Fountainhead Press X Series for Professional Development. This book enables students and instructors to access biographical and scholarly information about leading figures in the field of composition and other fields directly related to the study and teaching of composition.

COMPbiblio traces the evolution of composition by presenting how current leaders in composition came to their careers and continue to reinvent their research and teaching practices as new ideas arrive in composition studies.

The book’s format is designed to serve equally well as a textbook for graduate seminars or as a reference manual for a wider audience. In the “Leaders” section, each chapter is devoted to a specific composition leader and contains a brief biographical narrative and an annotated bibliography of sources relating to the work of that individual.

In the “Influences” sections, each chapter is focused on representative works in and around writing theory and practice to start your search.

This collection of essays is designed to assist with the tasks of understanding our students, thinking about how their insights are affecting the work we are asking them to do, introducing them to new ideas and ways of thinking without imposing our own viewpoints or negating theirs, and learning from our students as we expand our own worldviews and experiences. The authors of this collection call attention to the needs of students who have been labeled minority or “other” because of skin color, sex-object choice, religion, geography, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, age, language, physical embodiment, or other identifiers. The collection also offers guidance for incorporating issues of diversity into our curricula.

Essays include discussion of:
Embodiment – Looks at how your physical body must be recognized and used as a means to incorporate diversity into the classroom. Classroom Content – Advice on how to include diversity issues in your curriculum. Classroom Interaction – Examine diversity as it applies to classroom dynamics. Diversity within Texts – Teaches students to see how texts are used oppress others by what they include and what they leave out.

Teaching Creative Writing to Undergraduates: A Practical Sourcebook is written for the graduate student or novice instructor who is about to teach his or her first creative writing class. The text not only answers the obvious questions about how to plan a class, how to comment on student work, how to evaluate creative products, but also the less obvious questions about the instructor’s role and their identity in the classroom, their parameters as a teacher, and their responsibilities to student writers.

The text includes:
A course plan including a course syllabus and sequence of assignments. A grading apparatus. A set of scenarios about problem-solving. An extensive bibliography of further resources. An overview of the field of creative writing. Questions for further thought.

This book contains the insights of teachers who have used popular culture to inspire student writing. You will find a progression in the book from teachers who introduced analysis of a few elements of popular culture, such as a song or movie, into a traditional writing class to those who host entire classes in virtual worlds such as Second Life. If you are looking to add popular culture to your own writing classroom, you will be able to choose the pace that you are comfortable with, whether it is taking baby steps or charging full speed ahead with leaps and bounds.