Writing, Teaching, Learning: A Sourcebook

When Richard Graves set out to create a new edition of Rhetoric and Composition (Boynton/Cook, 1990), he envisioned a comprehensive collection that would chronicle the "birth" of the discipline up until the present. To his astonishment, he discovered a tremendous amount of current material treating issues heretofore unexplored. So instead, Graves has created an entirely new book—one that focuses on new ideas and fresh directions in the discipline.

More than a sourcebook, Writing, Teaching, Learning is a celebration of the writing-teaching process, reflecting the best writing about the teaching of writing published within the last ten years. Of the thirty-two essays, only seven appeared in earlier editions; twenty-five are entirely new. Each one is engagingly written, recommending ways to make our work not only more helpful to our students but more joyous as well. Taken together, the essays suggest that growth in writing is ultimately holistic, a part of a wider spectrum of growth that involves the whole person. Always present is the possibility for transformation, sometimes even transcendence.

Richard Graves was born in Texas in the midst of the Great Depression and was educated in public schools there. He taught English in Tampa, Florida, for seven years before moving to Auburn University, Alabama, where he recently retired as Professor of English Education in the department of curriculum and teaching. The teaching of writing has been the focal point of his career. He was founder and director of the Sun Belt Writing Project, cofounder of the Gulf Coast Conference on the Teaching of Writing, and, more recently, cofounder--with Alice Brand and Charles Suhor--of the NCTE Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning.