Negotiating multiple perspectives: a discussion of instructors’ practice within an English-language service course

At the University of the West Indies, large courses often require the involvement of multiple persons in their delivery. Within the English Language Foundation Unit, several of the courses offered cater to over 500 students in any given semester. The large number of students necessitates multiple practitioners providing instructions as part of the same course offering. While stylistics may vary, there is the need for course instruction and content to depict uniformity. Practitioners’ conceptualization of a specific topic will inform the instruction received by students. In instances where practitioners do not conceptualize content in a like manner, students within the same course may receive varied instruction, thus affecting student output and overall evaluation. The paper looks specifically at a service course offered at the University of the West Indies and the practices of the multiple persons involved in the teaching of the course. It provides an overview of practitioners’ discussion of their conceptualization of content areas within the courses and assesses the extent to which there are variations and/or similarities. It also discusses how these impact teaching and learning. The research seeks to derive an actionable direction for collaboration and further discussions within large service courses with the aim of improving teaching and learning.     

Effects of delayed constructed-response identity matching on spelling of dictated words

We studied the effects of delayed constructed-response identity matching on spelling with 6 first graders with histories of school failure. After training, the children learned to spell words to dictation and their cursive writing improved. These results replicate studies showing that delayed constructed-response matching establishes spelling. For 2 children, spelling of generalization words--words formed by recombining the syllables of training words--also improved. These results extend studies that have shown recombinative generalization in reading and spelling.     

The journey towards active self-care and empowerment: Insights from a thematic analysis of a women's therapeutic expressive writing group (UK)

There is a strong evidence base that demonstrates the beneficial impact of engaging in therapeutic writing tasks, often with reference to the successful emotional processing of traumatic life events. This paper looks to explore the experiences and impact of a community-based therapeutic expressive writing group, which embraced a direct psychoeducational model to enhance emotional well-being in a group of women. From an experiential qualitative position that embraces a “hermeneutics of empathy”, this study uses a thematic analysis (TA) methodology (informed by the work of Braun & Clarke (2013) to explore the group members' narratives obtained through semistructured interviews. The study reveals the significance of a number of key factors, including the importance of the group setting, the identification of core therapeutic writing activities, the beneficial impact of skilled and supportive therapist facilitation, and the emotional value in “letting go” of unhelpful thoughts and feelings in order to strengthen psychological well-being and resilience. The findings have important implications for service commissioning and the proactive delivery of effective time-limited, low-cost mental health interventions within primary settings across society.     

The skillful means and meanings of philosophy: Attention and immersion in the philosophical art of writing

This response to Richard Shusterman's Philosophy and the Art of Writing focuses on his concern that philosophy is, first and foremost, a way of life, illustrated in the West by the Socratic ideal of the philosopher and in the East by the example of the scholar-artist-gentleman. This paper examines the process of Buddhist meditation and the process of creating novels, supplementing the authors Shusterman carefully examines with examples from Black American literature, the author's own teacher John Gardner, and artistic colleagues the author has known. The basic thrust of the response is that the skillful means used in writing can indeed be a form of self-creation, but it can also be a means of liberation from the self.     

O'NEILL'S JOURNEY

This paper considers some of the processes through which Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) dramatically shaped his inner life and through which he created his plays. These processes at their finest are evident in his composition of Long Day's Journey into Night (1941a). During its 21‐month composition, the play went through three different versions, as evidenced by the playwright's handwritten and typed materials (O'Neill, unpublished, a, b, c, d). This paper posits that each version reflects O'Neill's changing state of mind as he began to master his instinctual life, developing increasingly rich characters and creating a painful, deeply tragic vision. Thus, this paper shows that O'Neill's great artistic achievement reflected a great psychological one.     

Resource diary: A positive writing intervention for promoting well-being and preventing depression in adolescence

Depression in adolescence is a widespread problem and leads to extensive psychosocial impairments. For these reason, a resource diary has been developed as a four-week positive writing intervention. The aims of this intervention were to enhance well-being, to promote emotion regulation and resource realization, as well as to prevent symptoms of depression in adolescence. Seventy-seven students of 8th form were randomized either to a positive writing group (n = 38) or to a neutral writing group (n = 39). At the post-test, the positive writing group showed a lower dysphoric mood, fewer worries and less rumination in comparison with the neutral writing group. No effects on resource realization were detected. This study provides the first evidence of the beneficial effects of positive writing on indicators of well-being and depressive symptoms. In conclusion, the resource diary represents an economical intervention for preventing depression in adolescence.     

Examining explanatory mechanisms of positive and expressive writing: Towards a resource-oriented perspective

This study tested the hypothesis that benefits of positive and expressive writing accrue when the intervention matches or activates the participant’s personal resources. Students were randomly assigned to keep a newly developed resource diary (RD, n = 114), which asked the participants to write about positive experiences and personal resources, or an expressive writing diary (ED, n = 114), which asked the participants to engage with negative emotional experiences, at home on three consecutive days per week for four weeks. Participants keeping the RD perceived significantly more social support and reported a significantly better mood at post-test than participants keeping the ED. Compared to a control group (n = 81) treatment effects of both writing interventions were higher for participants with lower pre-test values of well-being and brooding as well as for participants who wrote in an ‘atmosphere of activated resources.’ It is suggested that research should move away from testing deficit-compensating hypotheses towards a stronger resource orientation.     

Reflective writing: I wouldn’t start from here – examining a professional development initiative to enhance the scholarly activity of English HE in FE lecturers

This paper explores the nature of reflective writing through the experience of the researchers in running a series of writing workshops with a group of higher education practitioners working in a UK further education college. The focus here is on reflective writing, which was chosen to start the sequence of workshops, as it was perceived as a form of writing with which the participants would be familiar, given its role in the education and development of teachers within the sector. Our assumption was that this familiarity would facilitate the writing process and participants would readily respond by engaging in reflective writing. However, in practice this proved not to be the case, despite being introduced to a variety of different forms of writing over a series of workshops, it took the participants longer than we expected to begin to write. This led us to question our assumptions about the starting point for the writing workshops and what they might achieve. The paper draws on field notes made during the writing initiative and data gathered through focus groups and interviews with the participants, as well as extracts of their writing to examine their experiences. Different conceptualisations of reflective writing are identified and their implications are explored in relation to the participants’ engagement with writing and their experience of professional development.     

Visual Feedback in Written Imaginal Exposure for Posttraumatic Stress: A Preliminary Study

This study investigated the visual feedback hypothesis, which states that visual feedback from written trauma narratives contributes to the efficacy of written imaginal exposure for posttraumatic stress via the reuptake of traumatic content during production of the narrative. We tested a college sample (n = 61) with clinically elevated posttraumatic stress as measured with the Impact of Events Scale. Participants were randomly assigned to a writing with visual feedback condition, a writing without visual feedback condition, or a control condition. The hypothesis was not supported: Writing with and without visual feedback equally reduced intrusion and avoidance symptoms. Exploratory analyses, however, showed increased intrusion symptoms immediately after writing with visual feedback, which was in contrast with decreased symptom levels in the other conditions. These findings are in line with previous findings regarding immediate symptom development following writing interventions for posttraumatic stress and call for further exploration of the visual feedback hypothesis.     

Randomized controlled trial of expressive writing for psychological and physical health: the moderating role of emotional expressivity

The current study assessed main effects and moderators (including emotional expressiveness, emotional processing, and ambivalence over emotional expression) of the effects of expressive writing in a sample of healthy adults. Young adult participants (N=116) were randomly assigned to write for 20 minutes on four occasions about deepest thoughts and feelings regarding their most stressful/traumatic event in the past five years (expressive writing) or about a control topic (control). Dependent variables were indicators of anxiety, depression, and physical symptoms. No significant effects of writing condition were evident on anxiety, depressive symptoms, or physical symptoms. Emotional expressiveness emerged as a significant moderator of anxiety outcomes, however. Within the expressive writing group, participants high in expressiveness evidenced a significant reduction in anxiety at three-month follow-up, and participants low in expressiveness showed a significant increase in anxiety. Expressiveness did not predict change in anxiety in the control group. These findings on anxiety are consistent with the matching hypothesis, which suggests that matching a person's naturally elected coping approach with an assigned intervention is beneficial. These findings also suggest that expressive writing about a stressful event may be contraindicated for individuals who do not typically express emotions.