"The questions that guide a teaching life are timeless - the kind teachers ask themselves always, every year, every day: "What does it mean to teach this course and this student? How do I reach those I am instructed to teach" So write Perl and Wilson in the preface to this edition of Through Teachers' Eyes. In this book, based on extensive ethnographic research, the authors show us the texture of teaching in times both good and bad, exciting and despairing; they recount, in a compelling narrative, the unending shifts and changes of teaching lives. Perl and Wilson also recount researchers' stories. Like teaching, research has shifts and questions, doubts and despair and discovery.  Through Teachers' Eyes is a model of ethnographic research and in it, research data is turned into readable, accessible and powerful classroom stories. Those who hunger for an animating view of classroom research will find here what is sorely lacking in so many composition studies: a view of research that welcomes the researcher's voice as narrator and storyteller, as one whose caring can be shown as a natural part of the inquiry. Perl and Wilson write: "A teaching life lived fully is one that includes others. It is a life rooted in the sharing of projects and problems and most of all in the telling of stories." In these stories, readers will discover the richness of teachers' lives and in so doing also discover the richness of their own.

Through Teacher's Eyes: Portraits of Writing Teachers at Work

Education & Teaching

Perl, Sondra

Wilson, Nancy

Schools & Teaching

Heinemann

On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught To Hate

An award-winning teacher takes a journey into alien territory: Austria, Hitler's birthplace, and the territory of her own hatred. A teaching memoir that offers a pedagogy of hope. Most educators keep their teaching secret. In On Austrian Soil, an award-winning teacher, Sondra Perl, opens her classroom to reveal the struggles and successes she encounters when she, not without trepidation, raises the questions of history with her adult Austrian students, descendants of Nazis. Her students, teachers themselves, come face-to-face with the question of their responsibility not only to the past but also to the future. Perl’s careful descriptions are an invitation to scrutinize her teaching and thinking as well as her students’ own histories and hatreds. Writing together, she and her students break lifelong silences―discovering along the way the power of dialogue to transform deeply held prejudices.

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

State University of New York Press

Derived from the work of philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin, felt sense allows writers to attend to what is on the edge of their thinking.

Felt Sense: Writing with the Body

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

"The questions that guide a teaching life are timeless - the kind teachers ask themselves always, every year, every day: "What does it mean to teach this course and this student? How do I reach those I am instructed to teach" So write Perl and Wilson in the preface to this edition of Through Teachers' Eyes. In this book, based on extensive ethnographic research, the authors show us the texture of teaching in times both good and bad, exciting and despairing; they recount, in a compelling narrative, the unending shifts and changes of teaching lives. Perl and Wilson also recount researchers' stories. Like teaching, research has shifts and questions, doubts and despair and discovery. 
 Through Teachers' Eyes is a model of ethnographic research and in it, research data is turned into readable, accessible and powerful classroom stories. Those who hunger for an animating view of classroom research will find here what is sorely lacking in so many composition studies: a view of research that welcomes the researcher's voice as narrator and storyteller, as one whose caring can be shown as a natural part of the inquiry. Perl and Wilson write: "A teaching life lived fully is one that includes others. It is a life rooted in the sharing of projects and problems and most of all in the telling of stories." In these stories, readers will discover the richness of teachers' lives and in so doing also discover the richness of their own.

Through Teachers' Eyes

This book shows writers of all ages how to find and develop nonfiction topics that matter to them--in ways that make readers care too. It emphasizes writing for discovery, not just writing what one knows. It emphasizes a strong authorial presence (voice) and a convincing point of view. Most important, it not only tells but also shows how writing true involves the poet's attention to language, the fiction writer's power of storytellling, the journalist's pursuit of fact, and the scholar's reliance on research. The first part of the book offers ten practical chapters from getting started to turning first ideas into finished work. Topics include: The Power of the Notebook, Ten Ways to a Draft, Taking Shape, Finding Voice, Twenty Ways to Talk About Writing, The Craft of Revision, The Role of Research, The Ethics of Creative Nonfiction, Workshopping a Draft, and Exploring New Media. The second part of the book is an anthology of the best nonfiction writing for aspiring writers to read and study in order to write with creativity, integrity, and authenticity. Organized by form, they include Memoir, Personal Essay, Portrait, Essay of Place, Narrative Journalism, and Short Shorts. Selections represent a variety of experience from classic masters (E.B.White and George Orwell) to major contemporary writers (such as Alice Walker, Stephen Dunn, and Scott Russell Sanders) to up and coming writers (such as E.J. Levy and Amy Butcher). The anthology also includes "Stories of Craft," with five prominent writers, including Patricia Hampl and Sue Miller, describing the challenges and rewards of writing engaging nonfiction.

Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction

Literature & Fiction

Schwartz, Mimi

Literary

Cengage Learning'

As the field of composition studies became more sophisticated in its understanding of research, the designs and assumptions underlying the early work were called into question. Researchers were challenged to design studies that were sensitive to the varying contexts in which writers write and to the ways their own roles shaped their investigations. The more comprehensive studies called for by these critiques are only now beginning to appear. This volume presents some articles in which writers and what they do are at the center of inquiry. The focus is on what actually occurs as people write and how they make sense of what they are doing. Choosing such a focus grants human action central importance and enacts the belief that looking closely at individuals can be a primary starting point for understanding them and their worlds. Other papers take the researcher's shaping role into account. The integrity of such work rests not so much on a lifeless detachment from the phenomena being studied as on the author's vital engagement, and on a faithful rendering of what has been observed. This includes the author revealing his or her own impact of what has been seen and said. In the broadest sense, composing is something we all do: the students and parents and writers and teachers who serve as subjects of research and those who write the research itself. It is what each of us is engaged in when we shape our understanding of life through the writing we do. And it is what can continue to light the way in composition studies for it illuminates what still makes this inquiry so intriguing and so rich -- that only human beings have this capacity to look and see more, to create new texts and new work, and in the creating compose their way to new understandings and new selves.

Landmark Essays on Writing Process: Volume 7 (Landmark Essays Series)

Routledge

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