Resource Topics

Teaching Writing - Genre - Drama

Additional Resources

A Conversation About Creative Writing Pedagogy: Where Are We Going Next? (Part 2)

Fiction Writers Review, September 2011
Stephanie Vanderslice, director of the Great Bear Writing Project, along with educators Cathy Day and Anna Leahy, discusses creative writing pedagogy and how it fits into the educational landscape. More ›

A Conversation About Creative Writing Pedagogy: Where Are We Going Next?

Fiction Writers Review, July 2011
Stephanie Vanderslice, director of the Great Bear Writing Project, along with educators Cathy Day and Anna Leahy, discusses creative writing pedagogy and how it fits into the educational landscape. More ›

Bringing Hard Talk to Your Writing Project Site—with the Theatre of the Oppressed

January 2010
Chris Tsang
Role play based on the Theatre of the Oppressed offers teachers the opportunity to rehearse conversations around uncomfortable subjects such as race, class, and language. The model can be replicated at writing project sites and elsewhere. More ›

The Path Toward Opening Night: One Road to Literacy

October 2009
Ben Bates
Ben Bates, co-director of the Oklahoma State Writing Project, explores the premise that directed script reading and play production provide roads to literacy for his students. More ›

Learning From Laramie: Urban High School Students Read, Research, and Reenact The Laramie Project

May 2008
Marsha Pincus
When Marsha Pincus, a teacher with the Philadelphia Writing Project, had her students read The Laramie Project, and then research circumstances surrounding the play's real life events and perform its scenes, they were engaged—and changed—by its themes of homosexuality, homophobia, and murder. More ›

Developing Citizen-Teachers Through Performance Arts in the Summer Institute

National Writing Project at Work, 2006
Nancy Mellin McCracken, Anthony Manna, Darla Wagner, Bonnie Molnar
The authors describe their integration of the arts, particularly process drama, into the summer institute as a vehicle for providing equity, supporting educational reform, and promoting the concept of the citizen-teacher. More ›

Book Review: Literary Ideas and Scripts for Young Playwrights, by Lisa Kaniut Cobb

The Quarterly, 2004
Nancy McCorkle
Nancy McCorkle reviews this book for teachers of third through eighth grade, which shows how to use familiar poetry, fairy tales, and historical events as the basis for students to write and perform their own plays. More ›

English Language Learners, Classroom Drama

The Quarterly, 2004
Dana Loy
Through a drama and playwriting project, Dana Loy discovers a strategy to engage her Spanish-speaking eighth-graders that both taps into and strengthens their academic skills. More ›

Talking Texts: Writing Dialogue in the College Composition Classroom

The Quarterly, Spring 2002
John Levine
Is it possible for an inexperienced writer to juggle the ideas of several authors to create a coherent, analytical essay? Levine encourages students to get these writers talking to one another. More ›

Collaborating to Write Dialogue

The Quarterly, Summer 2002
Janis Cramer
Writing dialogue cooperatively, Cramer's students learn to develop characters, consider word choice, and interweave dialogue and description, while simultaneously strengthening their cooperative and independent writing skills. More ›

Tablespoon of Panic

Turning Points in Teaching: Narrative Reflection on Professional Practice, 2001
Michael Reinbold
Reinbold, a teacher-consultant with the Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University, tells a story of teacher rejuvenation as he takes a breakthrough idea from interviews with a group of seniors, to essays based on the interviews, to a series of monologues fashioned into a performance. More ›

Staging Learning: The Play's the Thing

The Quarterly, Summer 2000
Jean Hicks, Tim Johnson
The writers describe a method that employs sticky notes to create dramas that give students a voice. More ›

Writing-Drama Connections: A Conversation

The Quarterly, Summer 1993
Courtney Cazden, James E. Lobdell
Lobdell interviews Cazden, who describes a strategy she employs with middle school students: having them focus on an issue through improvised drama before writing about it. More ›