Content area
Full text
When I returned to the classroom in 1994, I began at the beginning. As before, I knew I wanted to try to create an environment conducive to writing: a writing workshop, with plenty of time to write and plenty of opportunities for choice, response, and publication. But this time I had glimmers of my new potential as a teacher of writing . Just as there are times when kids need a mirror someone to reflect back their writing to them, there are times when they need an adult who will tell them what to do next or how to do it. Bottom line, what they need is a Teacher Today I'm striving for the fluid, subtle, exhilarating balance that allows me to function in my classroom as a listener and a teller, an observer and an actor a collaborator and a critic and a cheerleader.
Atwell, 2nd ed. (20-21)
As we enter the twenty-first century, language arts teachers at all levels (preservice elementary and secondary teachers through college-level instructors) are looking closely at stories of the field of writing instruction, "taking stock" of the writing process movement (to paraphrase the title of Tobin and Newkirk's book) as it has evolved over the last thirty years. In fact, this special issue of English Journal on teaching writing in the new millennium signals such a movement to analyze and interpret these narratives. U In this essay, I focus on one of the most influential of these "narratives" for middle and high school writing teachers, Nancie Atwell's In the Middle, her seminal description of a middle school reading/writing workshop published in its first edition in 1987. Many of us can trace our emergence as writing workshop advocates to the program described in her text, which we imitated in our own language arts and composition classrooms.1 On the eve of the new millennium, Atwell has published the second edition of In the Middle, subtitled New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning. Indeed, the cover boasts that more than 70 percent of the material is new. As the opening epigraph illustrates, Atwell sees herself as a teacher with "new potential," and she implies a radically-transformed writing workshop environment. What is so new about this new workshop? What does Atwell mean...