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Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of postcolonial critique, that is, the continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of newly independent countries (NICs) on ex-colonizers as pointed out by neocolonialism, dependency theory, and postcolonial theory, respectively. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic literature as a “failed nation” and a state dominated by the military and plagued by religious extremism. As opposed to this, through the literary and activists writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, this chapter will try to illustrate how cultural contestation of the nation-building project postindependence from British rule was a lot more complex and interesting in Pakistan. This was so because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian, and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constituent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the marginalized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical, and literary insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan, which paralleled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early Subaltern Studies influenced by the Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan's literary and cultural sphere. This chapter not only tries to give a different postcolonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan but, though at a preliminary level, is an attempt to separate the original postcolonial theory in its radical tradition from contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory marked with pessimism and resignation.

The Indiana Writers Center (IWC) believes that everyone has a unique story to tell. The mission of IWC is to nurture a diverse writing community, to support established and emerging writers, to improve written and verbal communication, and to cultivate an audience for literature in Indiana (About the Indiana Writers Center, 2012, para. 1).

For more than 30 years, the IWC, a nonprofit organization, has worked to foster a vibrant literary writing community in Indiana, providing education and enrichment opportunities for both beginning and accomplished writers. (About the Indiana Writers Center, 2012, para. 1).

Teacher, writer, and community activist Darolyn “Lyn” Jones was asked to join the staff at the IWC in 2005 to meet the new initiative: take writing out of the center and to marginalized writers. Her charge was to help writers both find and share their voice.

The origin of this initiative began with a group of girls, ages 12–22 in a maximum state prison. The girls became the Center’s muse and because of their words, the Center was compelled to build, create, and nurture even more youth writers. The backstory of the IWC work with the girls will be featured in this chapter.

The product of that early work has now evolved into Building a Rainbow, an eight-week long summer writing program designed to teach creative narrative nonfiction writing program to youth using a curriculum that helps them identify meaningful moments, see them in their mind’s eyes, and bring them alive on the page in vivid, compelling scenes.

Currently funded by the Summer Youth Program Fund (SYPF) in Indianapolis, the Building a Rainbow writing program is free to youth participants and held in various locations that serve a diverse student population. This chapter will highlight our work with four different community partners: our first group of youth, girls at a maximum state prison, and our current work with an all African-American youth development summer camp for students ages 6–18 run by the Indianapolis Fire Department, a Latino leadership institute that works with Latino students ages 11–16, and a south side, historic community center that works primarily with Caucasian students living in poverty.

By forging new collaborative relationships with arts organizations, schools and universities, community organizations and social service providers, IWC has worked successfully to

• Create community with our writers and with partnering sites

• Identify, sort, and prioritize program objectives (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21) in designing and delivering curriculum that meets the diverse needs of each site’s student group and meets our mission

• Solicit and train instructors, university student interns, and community volunteers (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21)

• Present, publish, and perform our work for the greater writing community.

Create community with our writers and with partnering sites

Identify, sort, and prioritize program objectives (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21) in designing and delivering curriculum that meets the diverse needs of each site’s student group and meets our mission

Solicit and train instructors, university student interns, and community volunteers (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21)

Present, publish, and perform our work for the greater writing community.

Besides learning about the programming above, readers can also read and hear the words and voices of students at the sites as they share their memoirs of people, places, and events that have shaped them.

To be a writer, one must write. Research shows when teachers write and identify as writers, they transfer their writing practice into their classroom, positively impacting their students' writing development. Shifting instructional practices or identities requires educators to self-determine a gap in order to take on transformative learning experiences, such as mentoring, professional development, or modeled learning. Often professional development is chosen by administrators for educators to shift their instructional practice, ignoring a teacher's curriculum-maker role, and best-loved self identity. This narrative inquiry analysis details one teacher-writer in a creative writing professional development residency as she supports educators with a goal to transform educators into teacher-writers. This chapter includes the small step successes and systematic struggles the author faced as she modeled the writer's craft and writer's workshop strategies with her teachers. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the important role teachers have to decide, navigate, and discover their own best-loved self-teaching identity.

To describe how low-stakes writing can assist teachers in eliciting greater student engagement and involvement in their own writing by focusing the stages of the writing process more on student thinking than on the surface structure of their writing.

This chapter examines some of the important research literature addressing process writing in general and low-stakes writing in particular. The authors’ experiences with teaching English in the secondary classroom inform their analysis of implementing low-stakes writing assignments as part of the writing process.

The authors describe how using non-judgmental feedback on low-stakes writing assignments allows the teacher and students to have conversations on paper which are intended to help students explore, expand, and clarify their own thinking about a topic. By establishing a continuing conversation on paper with the students about their writing, the teacher takes on the role of “trusted ally” in the writing process, rather than the more traditional role of an arbiter of writing conventions.

Although the presumptive focus of writing instruction for the last two decades has been on the writing process, the tendency to turn the individual steps of the writing process into discrete writing products in a formulaic manner can cause many important parts of the writing process itself to be either overlooked or given short shrift. This chapter provides useful descriptions of ways in which low-stakes writing assignments can afford teachers the means by which to focus their students’ attention on key portions of the writing process so that their writing products are ultimately improved.

Business cycle theory is normally described as having evolved out of a previous tradition of writers focusing exclusively on crises. In this account, the turning point is seen as residing in Clément Juglar's contribution on commercial crises and their periodicity. It is well known that the champion of this view is Schumpeter, who propagated it on several occasions. The same author, however, pointed to a number of other writers who, before and at the same time as Juglar, stressed one or another of the aspects for which Juglar is credited primacy, including the recognition of periodicity and the identification of endogenous elements enabling the recognition of crises as a self-generating phenomenon. There is indeed a vast literature, both primary and secondary, relating to the debates on crises and fluctuations around the middle of the nineteenth century, from which it is apparent that Juglar's book Des Crises Commerciales et de leur Retour Périodique en France, en Angleterre et aux États-Unis (originally published in 1862 and very much revised and enlarged in 1889) did not come out of the blue but was one of the products of an intellectual climate inducing the thinking of crises not as unrelated events but as part of a more complex phenomenon consisting of recurring crises related to the development of the commercial world – an interpretation corroborated by the almost regular occurrence of crises at about 10-year intervals.

Given the increasing use of social media and other digital technologies, critical theorists argue that social life has become increasingly structured by neoliberal market logics. Little research has empirically tested these claims.

This study is the first to examine whether the use of digital technologies in the avant-garde literary field is accompanied by neoliberal logics. Developing a cultural logics approach to neoliberalism, which allows for the identification of the independent logics of entrepreneurship, market-faith, profit-maximization, efficiency, and individualism, I draw on archival data and interviews with editors and writers to explore the relationship between digital technologies and neoliberalism.

Editors and writers legitimate some neoliberal logics and reject others. Entrepreneurship and efficiency are strongly legitimated. Profit-maximization is generally rejected. Market-faith and individualism are legitimated differently by editors and writers who occupy different positions within the field, drawing attention to the importance of field position, organizational affiliation, and career exhaustion in the use of digital technologies in the avant-garde literary world. Many of these findings are surprising given the historically non-economic orientation of the field.

Future research should explore neoliberal logics in other aspects of literary production and in other social domains.

This study provides a novel approach to the study of neoliberal logics as well as their relationship to digital technologies. Such an approach complements recent agendas in economic sociology and contributes to debates about the relationship between new technologies and capitalism.

In this chapter, we describe our experiences creating and providing job-embedded professional development to teachers with an emphasis on creative writing. Our focus is on the intersectionality of communities. We share narratives and scenarios from each of the communities – the participating teachers/administrators and the writing coaches collaborating with them. The program's objective is to empower teachers to see themselves as writers to become more effective teachers of writing. We discovered the unique nature of each campus community of teachers/writers and also found the need to provide a space and intentional structures to enable writing coaches to support each other. To measure our impact on teachers, we describe a qualitative evaluation process. Using the lens of two disruptive forces – a hurricane and a pandemic – we explore the implications for the future of the work. Each disruption brought inequities in education to the forefront of our thinking.

By engaging levels of W/writerliness, this paper aims to identify how English Language Arts teachers’ personal and professional W/writerly identities impact their performance of pedagogical agency.

In this narrative inquiry, the author draws on theories of writing identity and agency to analyze how four mid-career English teachers’ personal beliefs around writing intersect with their professional practice. Data sources include interviews, journal entries and classroom observations.

Nuanced differences in teachers’ W/writerly identities produce more substantial differences in their pedagogy, especially impacting their performance of agency to (re)define successful writing outcomes and to balance process and product in their writing instruction.

This paper presents one method to expand preservice and in-service English Language Arts (ELA) practitioners’ approaches to teaching writing even alongside limitations of their teaching context by (1) emphasizing their ownership over their own writing in university methods courses; (2) leading teachers on an exploration of W/writerly identities; and (3) investigating ways teachers can transfer their personal and professional learning to students via their own pedagogical agency.

The study extends the work of scholars in the National Writing Project, suggesting that nuanced exploration of ELA teachers’ W/writerly identities in preservice and in-service settings could increase their sense of agency to work against and within cultures of standardization.

English teachers who write have valuable expertise that can benefit students. Although there is a fair amount of research on teacher-writers, little is known about teachers’ writing lives outside of educational or professional contexts. This paper aims to investigate the writing lives and teaching beliefs of five writing contest winners.

This qualitative study, which was guided by sociocultural theory and concepts such as literacy sponsorship, involved individual semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and writing and teaching artifacts.

Data analysis resulted in several themes describing participants’ writing lives: Writing Experiences, Writing Practices and Writing Attitudes. In addition, several themes emerged describing their teaching beliefs: Writing Assignments/Tools, Modeling and Credibility/Empathy/Vulnerability. Overlaps exist in the descriptions of their writing and teaching lives.

Teachers’ writing lives are valuable resources for instruction. It is recommended that teachers have opportunities to reflect on who they are as writers and what has shaped them. Teachers also need new experiences to expand their writing practices and strengthen their writing identities alongside fellow writers. More must be done to understand, nurture and sustain teachers’ writing.

This research expands the conversation on teachers as writers by involving writing contest winners, focusing on their writing lives and noticing how their writing experiences, practices and attitudes inform their teaching. This study suggests several ways to move forward in supporting teachers as writers, keeping in mind the social aspects of learning.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.