Among the many responsibilities of K-12 educators is to promote the development of environmental literacy among their students. Contentious environmental issues are often considered socioscientific issues (SSI; e.g., climate change) in that they are rooted in science, but a myriad of non-scientific (e.g., cultural, political, economic, etc.) factors must be addressed if those issues are to be successfully resolved. Teachers often report being ill-equipped to address these non-scientific factors, which may be due to struggles with employing socioscientific reasoning (SSR). SSR includes understanding the complexity of SSI, engaging in perspective-taking and ongoing inquiry about SSI, employing skepticism when dealing with potentially biased information concerning SSI, and recognizing the affordances of science and non-science considerations in resolving those issues. In this study, mathematics and science teachers who engaged in an SSIoriented professional development demonstrated a range of sophistication across the dimensions of SSR, with science teachers tending to exhibit more sophistication in their SSR than mathematics teachers. Herein, we share and discuss the results of the study, including the prompts and scoring rubrics with exemplars, which can be used to prepare teachers to teach about contentious SSI and enable them to more effectively instruct and evaluate their students when doing so.

This study examined the experiences of students in regular freewriting sessions. Freewriting is defined as nonstop writing during which the writer may freely move through topics but may not stop writing. In a packed school curriculum, why would teachers use freewriting? What advantages and disadvantages would they encounter? This study sought to explore students’ experiences with and attitudes towards freewriting. Other studies have been conducted on the results of freewriting on writing performance, but fewer studies, especially at the middle-sceondary level, have explored the experiences students have in freewriting. Freewriting has been pushed aside in the focus on test-preparations, quite often. However, freewriting gets to the key factor in success with writing: developing fluency. Fluent writers can think more clearly on paper and can use writing to learn in content areas. In addition, writing can provide benefits beyond the learning experiences, such as writing that is healing and the experience of flow that can result in focused writing. Such sustained experiences with writing, as this study explored, build fluency in student writing, generate motivation to write, and promote flow experiences for student writers. This qualitative case study included some quantitative data as well, thus a form of mixed method research was conducted, including interviews, student writing, observations, surveys, fluency measures, and writing apprehension scales. Data was collected over 18 weeks involving 17 eighth and ninth graders in two reading classrooms and their teacher. Students completed five-minute freewrites most every day for 18 weeks as part of their classroom warm-up.

This study focuses on how teachers enrolled in a graduate level, online English Education course perceived formulaic or thesis-driven student writing, commonly associated with the traditional “five-paragraph essay.” One goal of this course, “Writing, Reading, and Teaching Creative Nonfiction,” was to engage teachers in reflecting about the uses of this “new” genre in their own classrooms. Living in several states, the participants included one science teacher, four Special Education teachers, and ten middle and secondary Language Arts teachers. We analyzed 12 separate prompts posted to the discussion board over a six-week period. Also, participants were required to post one “thread” into each discussion board, with follow-up comments to threads from at least two other participants. Approximately 75 out of a total of 800 coded comments dealt with formulaic writing. The following patterns of participants’ perceptions emerged from these comments: (1) student benefits of formulaic writing; (2) a hierarchical sequence for teaching writing; (3) obligations to teach formulaic writing; (4) resistance to formulaic writing; (5) the constraints of formulaic writing on students; and (6) the constraints of formulaic writing on teachers. Based on this study, we recommend that teachers engage in writing themselves which includes risk taking, modeling writing and significant revision for their students, and sharing models of writing; ensure that their students write in many forms and genres, including, but not limited to, the five-paragraph essay; develop realistic views of the expectations and obligations they face daily; and internalize effective writing practices. In the process of exploring the genre of creative nonfiction, teachers also had to grapple with old debates, as almost all of this study’s participants changed their views, discovering that the chains they had felt actually were not as tight as they had originally believed.

This project has been part of our lives for a long time. It began in 2011 when all the editors were working at the Michigan State University (MSU) Writing Center, Trixie Smith as the director and the rest of us as graduate students. Every day we found ourselves grappling with issues and ideas connected to graduate writers through our work at the writing center: working one-to-one with graduate writers, facilitating graduate writing groups, and offering workshops for graduate students, such as our Navigating the Ph.D. workshop series. The work was also personally relevant to most of us since we were graduate students at the time, frequently finding ourselves experiencing imposter syndrome and letting our identities as graduate students consume our lives. Little did we-excepting Trixie, perhaps-know then that our interest in graduate writing would intensify when we became junior faculty and found that we still faced many of the same writing-related concerns that we did as graduate students.Our motivations for developing this edited collection on graduate writing across the disciplines began when we turned from interacting with graduate writers to researching graduate writers and graduate writing. When the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department at MSU began an initiative to create research clusters that bring faculty, staff, and students together to engage in conducting academic research and developing publications, we decided that a research cluster focusing on graduate writing would be ideal. We participated in this Graduate Writing Research Cluster for the two years that we were all still at MSU and continued to collaborate when we began moving into faculty positions outside of MSU. Our collaboration culminated in a special issue of Across the Disciplines and this edited collection. What

Association), was the chair of the Executive Committee for several years and served as the president from 1952 to 1959. Individuals who are honored with this prestigious award have conducted and published research that generates new knowledge and is deemed substantial, significant, and original. The individual is also recognized as a leader in the conduct and promotion of literacy research. For almost 40 years, Dr. Elfrieda (Freddy) H. Hiebert, the 2015 recipient of the Oscar S. Causey Award, has conducted research that has one foot in theory, influencing the ways we think about fundamental constructs of text, task, and reader, and one foot in policy and practice, forging new pathways through stubborn issues of curriculum and pedagogy. Her work speaks truth to power when it comes to initiatives that are ill conceived and poorly executed. Dr. Hiebert's most recent professional role has been as president and CEO of TextProject, a nonprofit organization she created to support dissemination of research and tools designed to bring beginning and struggling readers to high levels of literacy achievement. As part of TextProject, Freddy has managed a website that supports the translation of research to practice. With unusual deftness, she has continually employed new communication mechanisms (e.g., blogs, webinars, and podcasts) to support teachers in putting the right books in the hands of readers.