Inside Out: Strategies for Teaching Writing » (3rd Edition)

Just retired as the Language Arts Supervisor of the Dougherty County School System in Georgia, Tom Liner has taught writing for nearly 40 years. He now teaches part time at Darton College and is codirector of the Southwest Georgia Writing Project at Georgia Southwestern State University. He and his wife Myrna live in Albany, Georgia.

Dawn Latta Kirby is the coauthor of New Directions in Teaching Memoir (2007) and Inside Out, Third Edition (2004). A former high school English teacher as well as a department chair, she taught college classes in English methods, young adult literature, qualitative research methods, and writing in Colorado, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arizona. She is currently Professor of English and English Education at Kennesaw State University, where she directs the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project.

Dan Kirby is the coathor of New Directions in Teaching Memoir (2007), Inside Out, Third Edition (2004), and Mind Matters (1991). A former high school English teacher, Dan recently retired after more than thirty years of university teaching at the University of Georgia, the University of Central Florida, the University of Arizona, and the University of Colorado at Denver.

It all begins inside, inside the heads of our kids. There are ideas in there and language and lots of possibilities. Writing is a pulling together of that inside stuff. Writing is a rehearsal in meaning making. The teacher's role in all this is to support those rehearsals.

The first edition of this popular textbook was born out of notes such as this that a young professor and a young high school teacher wrote to each other about the teaching of writing. Dan Kirby and Tom Liner surprised themselves and the rest of academia by writing a book that other teachers found to be both entertaining and useful. The first and second editions of Inside Out have helped both preservice and in-service teachers to implement practical and authentic teaching techniques in their classrooms for the last twenty-plus years.

Now, the long-awaited third edition is at hand, this time with the addition of Dawn Latta Kirby's insightful work based on nearly 30 years of experience in teaching writing. Together the three authors have thoroughly updated Inside Out with the latest information on technology, a substantial reference section on resources, and loads of new examples. And they have gone a step further-they have rethought their fundamental assumptions about literacy and learning to write and have incorporated this innovative thinking into two new opening chapters and additional revisions throughout the book. They have introduced fresh concepts, overhauled some chapters, and added new ones so that the third edition includes:

• completely new material in the chapter on expository writing
• an updated chapter on poetry
• additional ideas about using portfolios, publishing student writing with and without computers, and working with young adult literature
• all-new resources in a chapter by Karen Hartman, Director of the Colorado Writing Project.

Still irreverent and skeptical of the conventional wisdom about teaching and learning, still abhorring corporate-strength writing pedagogies, these authors echo the voices of many teachers who remain committed to teaching to the needs of their students. Most of all, they give teachers the means to prove their belief that learning to write is not just for the few or the gifted.