Becoming a Teacher Who Writes: Let Teaching Be Your Writing Muse

Nancy Gorrell leads educators into her own decades-long journey of becoming a teacher who writes and who nurtures students and colleagues as writers and co-learners. The chronology moves through the author’s evolution as a creative writer, a teacher-writer, and then a teacher-artist, all the while writing and learning with her students in English classes and reaching out to students and teachers across the curriculum. The book serves as both an inspirational account of Gorrell’s personal story of becoming and as a guidebook for teachers to reflect on and create their own analogous story of becoming. Each chapter includes an illustrative teaching story or poem and the author’s reflections on her evolving journey, along with model student writing intended to both instruct and inspire readers and their students in their own writing. It also contains reflective exercises for teachers to work through and teaching activities that they can use in their classes. An additional feature of the book is its attention to writing across the curriculum and its inclusion of interdisciplinary models and applications. The book incorporates the work of the author as well as that of her many collaborators, including a number of interdisciplinary contributors and former students.