The Social Studies Teacher as Writing Coach.

Writing isn't just for English class anymore. Since 1973, many state-sponsored writing projects have been instituted in the wake of the Bay Area Writing Project's progressive ideas about the teaching of writing. Teachers across the disciplines have been bombarded with scads of quick fixes and some reasoned curatives designed for the improvement of student writing.1 A major underlying theme in all of the suggested remedies is that writing is knowing-a way not only to improve writing but also to help students improve in a particular subject.2 Teachers and researchers in various fields acknowledge that teaching writing is not solely the English teacher's responsibility. In many schools, English teachers and content-area teachers have pooled their resources to improve writing instruction.3 Alfred J. Ciani, for instance, claims that mathematicians recognize the importance of reading and writing skills for a child's understanding of mathematics.4 The social studies teacher's belief in the total curriculum approach to teaching writing was underscored several years ago by the National Council for the Social Studies's special edition of Social Education devoted to writing in the social studies.5 Teachers in other fields have expressed similar views about the importance of writing across the curriculum.6 Lee Odell has suggested that if writing is to be improved on a grand scale, the teacher must relate "the process of writing to the process of learning a given subject."' Furthermore, a subject-area teacher (such as a social studies teacher) must emphasize the importance of writing in different modes (the expressive and poetic as well as the transactional). For example, in addition to performing transactional writing about Benjamin Franklin (such as a biographical sketch), the social studies teacher might ask the student to write a poem depicting Franklin's feelings about his discoveries or an interpretive essay exploring Franklin's conflict between his religious and scientific be-