Road Less Traveled

Robert W. Blake received his doctorate in education from the University of Rochester. Since that time he has written over 60 books and articles over his long career as an English educator. He was Professor Emeritus with the State University of New York.Brett Elizabeth Blake received her doctorate in curriculum from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Following in her father’s footsteps, she has published over 20 articles and books in her field of literacy/applied linguistics and ESL. She is currently a professor and senior research fellow in The Vincentian Center for Social Justice and Poverty at St. John’s University in New York City.

• Acknowledgments – Introduction – Behavioral Objectives and the Teaching of English (1971) – I See You, I Hear You, You’re OK: Humanizing the English Classroom (1974) – The New English: Hot Stuff or Cool, Man, Cool? (1970) – Linguistics and the Teacher (1965) – Once Upon a Morpheme: An NDEA Institute in Applied Linguistics for the Elementary School Teacher (1967) – I See What You Mean—But Not by Words: Extraverbal Communication (1973) – The Composing Process and Its Relationship to the Teaching of Writing (1980) – Teaching Ideas: Back-to-basics: How To Talk to a Writer, or Forward to Fundamentals in Teaching Writing (1976) – Composing for the Left Hand: Writing Activities for the Intermediate Grades (1978) – Composing as the Curriculum: The Albion Writing Project (1979) – Setting Up an Effective Writing Program in the Schools (1981) – Assessing English and Language Arts Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Writers and Writing (1976) – Poets on Poetry: Writing and the Reconstruction of Reality (1990) – Poets on Poetry: One Way To Write a Poem (1991) – Poets on Poetry: The Morality of Poetry (1992) – Responding to Poetry: High School Students Read Poetry (1986) – Using the Personal Response To Become a Learning Community: A Model for Secondary Students To Learn To Read Short Fiction (1991) – Reader Response: Toward an Evolving Model for Teaching Literature in the Elementary Grades (1996) – The Play’s the Thing for Middle School Students (1989) – Converting Narrative into Drama: Using the Composing Process To Integrate the Language Arts (1982) – Starting Off a Non-native Student in a College Basic Skills Classroom (1982) – A New Look at Basic Skills Writing Instruction: A Teacher Workshop for Basic Skills Writing in the Secondary Schools (1983) – How Can We Help Our Teen-agers? (1966) – Is Teacher Education Governable? (1973) – Index.

“If you want to understand the architecture of contemporary literacy studies, surveying Robert W. Blake’s impressive body of work is a wise way to begin. Over the course of a decades-long career, Dr. Blake helped build a foundation that would support the ‘language arts’ growing into a professionalized field of study informed by a multi-dimensional theoretical framework. Dr. Blake, a creative educator and prolific writer, helped introduce and popularize a wide-range of innovations and ideas that radically changed classrooms across the country. Through his work we can trace how our profession came to embrace ideas from many corners of the academy—linguistics, socio-linguistics, psychology, composition studies, response theory, literary studies, general curriculum and pedagogy—but always with the student at the center of his concern. I will happily replace my ‘course packet’ of articles surveying literacy studies over the decades with this thoughtfully curated collection from one of our truly great educators.”—Rob Linné, Professor and Director of English Education at Adelphi University