Writers All Around Us

About the Book

As far back as 1946, the Commission on the English Curriculum of the the National Council of Teachers of English recommended a program that was to be organized around the ideas, experiences, and feeling of pupils; language was to grow out of the children; language experiences were to be presented as a wholesome way to use leisure, become a useful instrument, and develop into a potential art form.

Yet today too many teachers and would-be writers still concentrate on the mechanics of syntax, spelling, and punctuation, ignoring that “delight in the sounds and feel of new words and phrases” that characterizes the effective communicator and teacher of the arts of communication.

In contrast, the authors, heeding the recommendations of the professional commission,  have developed a three-stage educational-communication model with writing as the hub of the entire curriculum. Adapted to Job Corps centers, adult and geriatric education, college teaching, and remedial education, “it not only gets results but... keeps the learning process humane yet rigorous, spontaneous but disciplined, enjoyable and significant.” (Leland Jacobs).

The readers of this book (teachers, teachers-to be, parents, grandparents) learn first how to help the student recognize and express feelings and thoughts--to compose orally; second how to help the novice to move from oral to written language and eventually to accept the discipline and recognize the value of predesigned poetic and prose forms and criticism; and third how to encourage new writers to reach out to others through their compositions, a step that leads inevitably, and naturally, to reading.

About the Author

Robert & Lois Wolsch have been pioneers and favorite discussion leaders, for over four decades, in bringing listening, speaking, writing, and reading together. They have demonstrated their ideas, to make composition an enjoyable experience and a major part of every classroom and home, to parent and professional groups throughout the country. Robert Wolsch, Ed.D. Curriculum & Teaching Language Arts, Teachers College, Columbia University, Professor of Communication & Education, emeritus, Western Connecticut State University. Robert Wolsch has been a language arts consultant, providing 400 in class demonstrations each year for 12 years to students and teachers about speaking and writing. Then, as Director of Curriculum Development for the Experimental Program of the Urban Job Corps, his language centered, curriculum research program earned major government funding. His Poetic Composition Through The Grades: A Handbook for Teachers, an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation under Professor Leland Jacobs, was published by Teachers College Press. The National Council of Teachers of English recommended it for all professional libraries. Robert originated and coordinated the graduate Communication Arts programs for teachers at Western Connecticut State University, which, with composition as a central focus, were recommended in a national study as models for inexpensive, multidisciplined teacher education. The first professor to receive the Connecticut Education Association’s Human Relations Award, Robert is listed in Leaders in Education and Who’s Who in Education. Lois Cothran Wolsch, M.A. Speech & Child Development, University of Michigan, Remedial Speech & Language Teacher, retired, Danbury, Connecticut Public Schools & Adjunct, Western Connecticut State University. Lois Cothran Wolsch, with Robert, previously coauthored From Speaking to Writing to Reading, published by Teachers College Press which stressed the concept of speech first, leading to writing and then to reading. She began her career at the Shady Trails Speech Camp of the University of Michigan and by organizing the speech program in the Ann Arbor, Michigan Public Schools. She continued in the Rockville Centre Public Schools, Nassau Community College, Danbury Public Schools, and part time at Western Connecticut State University. The Wolsch’s have been favorite workshop leaders and long time advocates of interpersonal communication and writing in heterogeneous groups on all levels of education. This is one of their new Litaracy Assured Series including: Language Arts to Communication Arts: Reorganizing For Tomorrow’s Literacy, Foibles of Phonics: And Other Roadblocks to Literacy, and Learning Through Speaking: 810 Performance Based Language Lessons.