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Death is often encountered in English courses—Hamlet’s death, celebrity death, death from the terrorist attacks on 9/11—but students rarely have the opportunity to write about their own experiences with death. In Death Education in the Writing Classroom, Jeffrey Berman shows how college students can write safely about dying, death, and bereavement. The book is based on an undergraduate course on love and loss that Berman taught at the University at Albany in 2008. Part 1, “Diaries,” is organized around Berman’s diary entries written immediately after each class. These entries provide a week-by-week glimpse of class discussions, highlighting his students’ writings and their developing bonds with classmates and teacher. Part 2, \"Breakthroughs,\" focuses on several students’ important educational and psychological discoveries in their understanding of love and loss. The student writings touch on many aspects of death education, including disenfranchised grief. The book explores how students write about not only mourning and loss but also depression, cutting, and abortion—topics that occupy the ambiguous border of death-in-life. Death Education in the Writing Classroom is the first book to demonstrate how love and loss can be taught in a college writing class—and the first to describe the week-by-week changes in students’ cognitive and affective responses to death. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to writing teachers, students, clinicians, and bereavement counselors. Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION: “Life Lessons” PART 1: Diaries CHAPTER 1—Week One “Nervous Undergraduates Avoiding Eye Contact” CHAPTER 2—Week Two “Hearing It Made His Death More Real” CHAPTER 3—Week Three “She Helped Me Say What I Could Not Say Myself” CHAPTER 4—Week Four “There’s Too Much Covering Up of Grief in America” CHAPTER 5—Week Five “We’re Going to Die” CHAPTER 6—Week Six “Thinking Like a Writer” CHAPTER 7—Week Seven “I’m Sorry, I Understand” CHAPTER 8—Week Eight “Sometimes I Feel Like an Outsider in This Class” CHAPTER 9—Week Nine “I Felt As If I Were Reliving that Day” CHAPTER 10—Week Ten “There Is No Preparation for a Sight of Death” CHAPTER 11—Week Eleven “I Love You Too Much” CHAPTER 12—Week Twelve “We’re Taking Risks in a Safe Place” CHAPTER 13—Week Thirteen “Write As If You Were Dying” CHAPTER 14—Week Fourteen “I Used to Cry in the Middle of the Night and Contemplate Suicide” CHAPTER 15—Week Fifteen “I Am Not Alone in This Battle” PART 2: Breakthroughs CHAPTER 16—Chipo “I Have to Turn My Shattered Reality into a Livable Dream” CHAPTER 17—Lia “Instead of Minimizing My Struggles, I Wrote about Them” CHAPTER 18—Shannon “It’s Hard for Me to Express Emotion” CHAPTER 19—Faith “If I Could Not Write, I Would Not Survive” CHAPTER 20—Anonymous “I Will Always Remember My Unborn Baby” Conclusion: Reading Dying to Teach Appendix: Syllabus for English 450: Writing about Love and Loss References Student Writers Index

The Psychology of Creative Writing takes a scholarly, psychological look at multiple aspects of creative writing, including the creative writer as a person, the text itself, the creative process, the writer's development, the link between creative writing and mental illness, the personality traits of comedy and screen writers, and how to teach creative writing. This book will appeal to psychologists interested in creativity, writers who want to understand more about the magic behind their talents, and educated laypeople who enjoy reading, writing, or both. From scholars to bloggers to artists, The Psychology of Creative Writing has something for everyone.

Writing is not just about conveying 'content' but also about the representation of self. (One of the reasons people find writing difficult is that they do not feel comfortable with the 'me' they are portraying in their writing. Academic writing in particular often poses a conflict of identity for students in higher education, because the 'self' which is inscribed in academic discourse feels alien to them.)The main claim of this book is that writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped subject positions, and thereby play their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs and interests which they embody. The first part of the book reviews recent understandings of social identity, of the discoursal construction of identity, of literacy and identity, and of issues of identity in research on academic writing. The main part of the book is based on a collaborative research project about writing and identity with mature-age students, providing:* a case study of one writer's dilemmas over the presentation of self;* a discussion of the way in which writers' life histories shape their presentation of self in writing;* an interview-based study of issues of ownership, and of accommodation and resistance to conventions for the presentation of self;* linguistic analysis of the ways in which multiple, often contradictory, interests, values, beliefs and practices are inscribed in discourse conventions, which set up a range of possibilities for self-hood for writers.The book ends with implications of the study for research on writing and identity, and for the learning and teaching of academic writing.The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of social identity, literacy, discourse analysis, rhetoric and composition studies, and to all those concerned to understand what is involved in academic writing in order to provide wider access to higher education.

University classrooms are increasingly in crisis—though popular demands for accountability grow more insistent, no one seems to know what our teaching should seek to achieve. This book traces how we arrived at our current impasse, and it uses Lacan's theory of the four discourses to chart a path forward via an analysis of the freshman writing class. How did we forfeit a meaningful set of goals for our teaching? T. R. Johnson suggests that, by the 1960s, the work of Bergson and Piaget had led us to see student growth as a journey into more and more abstract thought, a journey that will happen naturally if the teacher knows how to stay out of the way. Since the 1960s, we've come to see development, in turn, only as a vague initiation into the academic community. This book, however, offers an alternative tradition, one rooted in Vygotsky and the feminist movement, that defines the developing student writer in terms of a complex, intersubjective ecology, and then, through these precedents, proposes a fully psychoanalytic model of student development. To illustrate his practical use of the four discourses, Johnson draws on a wide array of concepts and a colorful set of examples, including Franz Kafka, Keith Richards, David Foster Wallace, Hannah Arendt, and many others.

Bruce McComiskey is a strong advocate of social approaches to teaching writing. However, he opposes composition teaching that relies on cultural theory for content, because it too often prejudges the ethical character of institutions and reverts unnecessarily to product-centered practices in the classroom. He opposes what he calls the \"read-this-essay-and-do-what-the-author-did method of writing instruction: read Roland Barthes's essay 'Toys' and write a similar essay; read John Fiske's essay on TV and critique a show.\" McComiskey argues for teaching writing as situated in discourse itself, in the constant flow of texts produced within social relationships and institutions. He urges writing teachers not to neglect the linguistic and rhetorical levels of composing, but rather to strengthen them with attention to the social contexts and ideological investments that pervade both the processes and products of writing. A work with a sophisticated theory base, and full of examples from McComiskey's own classrooms, Teaching Composition as a Social Process will be valued by experienced and beginning composition teachers alike.