University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing is pleased to announce that new editions of Timothy Lensmire’s two trailblazing books on writing workshops are now available.

Originally published in 1994, this new open access, online edition of When Children Write will allow new scholars to study this ground-breaking work. As the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Cynthia Lewis notes in the new foreword to the 2nd edition, “Tim’s book was one of the first to reveal the underbelly of the workshop as children in his classroom vied for each other’s attention in ways that sometimes humiliated their classmates and reproduced normative and debilitating structures of gender and social class. Further, his book shows that the ‘free’ in free choice and the ‘individual’ in individual voice isn’t very free or individual at all.” Modern scholars can now explore this extended meditation on the possibilities and limits of progressive education.

Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching, with a new foreword by the University of Richmond’s Nathan Snaza, is essential reading for any teacher who wants to give students freedom and flexibility to explore their voices and their power through writing. Researchers working on educational theory will also find an abundance of useful material in Lensmire’s work, which is grounded in his practical experiences as well as Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of carnival and discourse and John Dewey’s vision of radical democratic education.

“I hope to help teachers and students live worthier lives in schools. And for me, worthier lives means more democratic lives,” Lensmire writes.

For more information about Publishing Services, please contact libpubs@umn.edu.