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This qualitative study examined a five-day summer professional development workshop for English language arts teachers on argument writing. Fourteen teacher participants learned from five different professionals who discussed the role of argument in their fields. Teacher blog posts were coded to understand what teacher participants perceived as important to or different from their previous understandings. Findings include (a) authentic argument is as much about an attitude or state of mind as it is about a product on paper; (b) in schools, argument instruction is very focused on structure; (c) research and data are essential to argument outside of schools; and (d) authentic argument has consequences. These findings have implications for those teaching argument writing as an authentic act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon an explanation of the proleptic, an understanding of time as being socially constructed within specific contexts, to interpret a series of dramatic sequences enacted in ethnodramatic pedagogy. The authors present two major arguments: (1) teachers can help students analyze the processes that influence and shape their identities by adopting a proleptic framework; (2) ethnodrama, a dramatic and dialogic approach to interpreting texts, creates an opportunity for students to evaluate the social forces that shape identity construction as they situate and reflect on texts within multiple contexts. The authors delineate the ways in which teachers can use ethnodrama to help students revise their understandings of the personal and cultural implications of texts by situating these understandings in different configurations of place, space, and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]