Deborah O'Dowd’s most recent work is the newly released Fashion Fighter, her first children's novel. Published in 2007, it won the iUniverse Editor's Choice Award, which entitles her book representation at the New Title Showcase Conference at BookExpo America in Los Angeles as well as the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany this summer. Fashion Fighter is an anti-war, pro-veteran and pro- humanity children's novel set in the Roskruge Escuela Bilingue/West University neighborhood in Tucson.  Check it out at www.fashionfighter.net. Deborah attended the SAWP Summer Institute in 2003 and has other books to her name. They can be found by googling her name.

Cusumano, Kate. 2007. "What I Learned From Teaching Marisol." Arizona English Bulletin. Fall 2007.

Toso, Erec. 2007. Zero at the Bone: Rewriting Life After a Snakebite. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press .

Erec says, "What started as a newspaper article turned into a book. It's a story about healing and about re-thinking one's 'life stories.' The story begins with the snakebite in Tucson in my front yard, but then travels a journey in which I learn about snakes, the desert, and myself. I decided to follow the writing wherever it took me, no matter how circuitous, winding, or dark the path. I learned about re-writing in a big way."

More information and purchasing opportunity available at: http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/BOOKS/bid1788.htm

Shanley, Roger. 2007. "From the Secondary Section: Paradoxical Oxymorons." English Journal, January 2007.

This PDF file (581 KB) is viewable with Adobe Acrobat which you can download from the Adobe website: http://www.adobe.com/

Miller, Sharon, ed. 2007. Voices in the Village: Tales from Two Years. An Anthology of Working Papers Plus. Volume 7. Teacher Research Institute, Southern Arizona Writing Project, University of Arizona.

Hall, Anne-Marie, Roger Shanley and Flory Simon. 2006. A Work in Progress: The Benefits of Early Recruitment for the Summer Institute. National Writing Project at Work Monograph Series.

Site leaders at the Southern Arizona Writing Project needed to increase their pool of summer institute applicants, so they created a plan to recruit early. They invited interested teachers, principals, and district administrators to attend their “Slice of SAWP” on the last day of the summer institute. The site sent out acceptance letters in December but continued the enrollment process with interviews in January and with “Saturday Seminars,” designed to support new fellows in preparing their demonstrations and introduce them to the writing project culture. The result: not only did the site achieve its goals, the participants were better prepared.

A free Downloadable PDF File (793 KB) is available at the National Writi

ng Project website: http://www.writingproject.org/cs/nwpp/lpt/nwpr/2362

Miller, Sharon. 2006. "Exploring the Nature of Theory in a Teacher Research Community," (October 2006, volume 7, issue 4). The Thinking Classroom: A Journal of Reading, Writing and Critical Reflection (also published in Russian under the name of Peremena). Published by the Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking International Consortium. The article describes a series of conversations by teacher researchers in our Teacher Research and Inquiry Institute that took place over a period of three years.

Toso, Erec. 2006. "Guest Opinion: Let's listen to teachers, not questionable tests." Tucson Daily Star. Tucson, Arizona. Published 10.05.2006.
Available online at: http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/149583
or as PDF document (32 KB)

Green, Deb. 2005. "Working Together: Designing a Districtwide Action Research Plan for Professional Development." in Working Toward Equity: Resources and Writings from the Teacher Research Collaborative. Edited by Linda Friedrich, Carol Tateishi, Tom Malarkey, Elizabeth Radin Simons, and Marty Williams.

Deb Green skillfully described the process that started as an idea and is now fully developing into a viable Action Research professional development option for Career Ladder participants in our district. She clearly established the realities of undertaking such an endeavor, but reminds us of the certainty that results when educators gather to collaborate about life in the classroom. The challenge remains to continue to nurture a learning community while evolving.

The publication is a valuable resource for educators, administrators, and program directors. It offers insight into first hand experiences of the practitioner and provides an opportunity for the reader to reflect and to design and create processes that ultimately impact our most valuable resource, our students.

Reviewed by:
Cheryl Siqueiros
Career Ladder Liaison
Sunnyside Unified School District

Available on-line at: http://www.writingproject.org/Publications/books/workingtoward.csp

What is equity? What does it mean to work for equity in schools? What does it mean to make equity central in our work as teacher-researchers? Working Toward Equity explores these and other questions in 13 narratives from a broad spectrum of educators chronicling their real work in classrooms, schools, districts, and professional development organizations.

Working Toward Equity grew out of the pursuits of the Teacher Research Collaborative, a three-year collaboration among educators who believe that the power of inquiry can be focused on vital educational goals such as equity. The educators are affiliated with the following organizations.

Miller, Sharon. ed. 2005. Doing Academic Writing in Education: Connecting the Personal and the Professional. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

This book focuses on the struggles of real writers to find an authentic, personal voice in educational and academic settings. Throughout the book, educators from all levels share their experiences with writing as students and as professionals, providing readers with models for exploring their own encounters with “the language of the academy.” The general goal of the book was to resolve the conflict between the academic and the personal voices and to offer readers a model as well as strategies for reconciling this conflict for themselves. In the foreword, Donald M. Murray refers to these two voices as “male” and “female,” declaring that “[t]he writing [in the book] itself is a model of effective personal academic prose . . . demonstrating how we can combine the two languages of our profession.”

Edited by SAWP Co-Director Sharon Miller, the book includes contributions from SAWP Fellows Deborah Green , Heather Brown, Sandra Engoron-March, Debbie Dimmett, Gopa Goswami, Sandra Florence, and citations of Michael Robinson and Tilly Warnock.

Scarborough, Harriet Arzu, ed. 2000. Writing Across the Curriculum in Secondary Classrooms: Teaching From a Diverse Perspective. Merrill Prentice Hall. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. ISBN 0-13-022489-8

Based on a need to teach writing and thinking across the curriculum, Harriet Scarborough worked with a number of her esteemed colleagues and practical thinking middle school and secondary school teachers to create a text for today's diverse classrooms. The author and her text contributors met regularly for a year to identify what was working in the classroom. They offer this book to you as you look to:

other writing-related publications:

• National Writing Project publications
• National Council of Teachers of English online bookstore
• Heinemann Books

Read the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing
Developed by
Council of Writing Program Administrators
National Council of Teachers of English
National Writing Project

This Framework describes the rhetorical and twenty-first-century skills as well as habits of mind and experiences that are critical for college success. Based in current research in writing and writing pedagogy, the Framework was written and reviewed by two- and four-year college and high school writing faculty nationwide and is endorsed by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project.