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Purpose This paper is an exploration of the potential impact of narrative writing and creative non-fiction on historical scholarship. Framed by the question of where a manuscript would be shelved in the library, this paper aims to survey the role of space, physical and metaphorical, in how we categorize, curate, cultivate and present narrative scholarship.Design/methodology/approach Using primary source material related to Newark stadium building and a broad-range scholarship concerning space, the author will place them in conversation with historian John Demos’ autobiographical narrative writing style.Findings The author hopes this paper furthers the conversation on the impact of narrative on scholarly writing and literacy.Originality/value By advancing this conversation, the author’s hope is that scholars will expand the possibilities of topics, sources, analysis, narrative styles and presentation of the information they both find and produce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 shows that some Japanese non-fiction writers are using various structural characteristics of spoken discourse in their writing. Their written discourse includes non-canonical word order and long sentences that are produced by combining a series of clauses. Their sentences may lack case or topic marking particles, but they may contain clause-final particles. Their discourse looks like it may have gone through a dynamic, on-going formation process because it includes reformulation and changes in the structure in midstream. It is proposed that writers who adopt such an. approach are deliberately blurring the boundary between speech and writing for multiple reasons. They may be exhibiting their creativity and innovation as well as their anti-establishment ideology. Vernacular style writing may also be an attempt to engage, involve, and connect with their readers. Further, they may be reflecting as well as expressing contemporary society in which orality is viewed favorably and as a result, writing in general has become increasingly more casual than before. The phenomenon discussed in this paper may be viewed as a reflection of erosions and shifting of traditional genres. [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]

This paper describes the visuals second grade students included in their own information book compositions during a science unit on weather during which multimodal science trade books on the topic of weather were read aloud. First, the multimodal nature of the information books used in the unit are described. Second, the teacher's talk about visual representations during read alouds of books on weather is presented. And third, the children's own information books about weather topics are examined for inclusion of labeled pictorial illustrations with accompanying captions and graphical representations. These analyses reveal that 1) information book authors vary in their use of visual information, 2) some graphics may be more salient for children, and 3) children's use of pictorial illustrations and graphical representations in their own compositions seems to be impacted by both teacher attention to particular types of visual representations and immersion in information book graphics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]