Authors: Linda Rief, Nancie Atwell
ISBN-13: 9780435085988, ISBN-10: 0435085980
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Heinemann
Date Published: December 1991
Edition: 1st Edition
LINDA RIEF teaches 8 th grade at Oyster River Middle School in Durham, NH and is an instructor in the University of New Hampshire's Summer Literacy Institute. She is the author of Seeking Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents (1992), Vision and Voice: Extending the Literacy Spectrum (1999), both published by Heinemann - and 100 Quickwrites (2003), published by Scholastic. For five years she co-edited with Maureen Barbieri Voices from the Middle , a journal for middle school teachers published by the National Council of Teachers of English.
Seeking Diversity is the result of watching, listening to, and learning from adolescents. It is also about a teacher, a learner engaged in the process of coming to know herself as a reader and writer in her own classroom. It is a chronicle of apprenticeship, where the students do astonishing things as readers and writers because their teacher believes they can, because she expects them to, and because she is right there beside them-reading, writing, questioning, thinking, learning, and growing.
Linda Rief takes the philosophies and ideas of Atwell, Romano, Graves, Murray, Calkins, and the Goodmans and makes them her own. She adapts them to her classroom, her students, her style, her constraints and invites other teachers to do the same- stretch the ideas, make them theirs, but above all, trust the students.
Seeking Diversity is organized chronologically, following Linda and her students from September through June. Teachers will find especially helpful:
Preparing for the Lesson: Organizing the Room, Materials, Expectations
Immersion: Writing and Reading
Generations: Writing and Reading for Life
Yes! Sometimes We All Read the Same Book
Bringing It All Together: Reader's-Writer's Project
Evaluation: Where I Am, Where I Want to Be
Finding the Value in Evaluation: Portfolios
Beyond Words: The Art of Literature/The Language of the Arts
Apprenticeship: At Four or Fourteen