Summer Reading 2008

How far is everyone into this book? I am really enjoying the readings in the first section. The questions are provocative and several debates on teacher/student responsibilities/roles sound VERY familiar. Unfortunately, I see my current district stepping away from the full development of the student toward data collection and detached responsibility in forming the future citizens of America, regardless of whether they pursue higher education or not. Thoughts?

I’ve just returned from south-central Illinois, deep in the heart of river and corn country. I dropped my eldest off at a weekend retreat called “Emmaus Days.” It is an opportunity for him to discover further and reflect on the role his faith plays in his life and where that relationship will lead him. It is alot to ask of a sixteen year old, I think. And yet, I am in awe of his willingness to engage in such mature and meaningful reflection. This brings me to my question: Is reflection a skill we assume all students have? Or as teachers can we somehow do a better job in preparing our students for meaningful reflection? I have stated elsewhere that reflection is an integral part, from my perspective, of the writing process and yet it continues to be an area students either rush through or attempt to skip altogether. Is it because they simply don’t know how to do it? When we teach reading, we encourage our students to ask a series of questions that will help them assess their own comprehension levels. Through practice, they eventually learn how to do it on their own without any particular formula. Do we need to do the same practice with writing and reflection?

In Ann George’s “Critical Pedagogy,” I have found the fundamental answer to my questions: What is the purpose of my course? What is my main function as the teacher?  I inherited much of what I teach my seniors from my predecessor, and yet have looked to make the course more personal, more my own in hopes that my students too would make their writing more their own. In essence, I believe I am striving to stimulate a greater critical consciousness in my students.  George refers to Paulo Freire quite often and I will add him to my reading list. I want my students to really connect themselves to their writing and hopefully invest themselves through action. Perhaps it is my liberal arts background motivating me. It seems what is missing for many of my students is their ability to envision something different, to be inspired to address possible alternatives, and to be the ones responsible for growth and change. We all strive to empower our students with knowledge, but do they know how to convert that knowledge into active participation and leadership? How do students learn to value their own educational experiences without seeing a practical application in their own lives? This is where reflection can connect the learning with experience. But in considering the reflection, students need to first know what they value. They also need to know what the moral implications of their actions may be and possibly should be. This is where ethics education steps in and where the focus of my project begins.

I was also attracted to the principles of community-service learning. Finding opportunities for students to put their critical thinking to work by way of solving community-based problems and “to engage them as subjects of intellectual inquiry” (137). Writing becomes a tool for understanding their own role in society, based on first-hand learning experiences. The idea of securing students service-based opportunities to research their own inquiries into areas of their communities is exciting. Their learning becomes relevant and has to infuse their writing with greater depth and elaboration. For instance, my juniors read a novel titled Our America, recounting life of two teens in the Chicago housing projects. Although the students enjoy reading the novel, there is a gap between appreciating what is written and making it relevant to their own lives. Adding a service-learning opportunity in conjunction with the novel may be the way to make it all more relevant and engage the students in their own community needs.

Again I ask how I can make learning more meaningful for my students? In a time when skill sets and test results drive the curriculum, how can I step away from the statistical requirements and truly focus on the development of the conscientious young adult? George and Julier offer some attractive alternatives to the traditional pen and paper. They offer enrichment opportunities for individuals to really think about their words and their purpose.

After reading McLeod’s essay, I am reminded of how much I don’t know about teaching writing.  When I was teaching in Indiana, I took a one-week workshop on how to teach students to write across the curriculum within an English class.  We used the Bedford St. Martin’s text Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum so as to provide students with non-fiction texts they might encounter in non-English courses.  While I was able to identify for students the differences in the content of the reading material, it was still hard to identify the unspoken and unwritten rules for writing within each discipline.  

McLeod’s argument that we often fail to see beyond our own training rings true, and I experienced this first-hand last year while working collaboratively on a writing assignment with a history teacher.  He came to me with the idea, for he wanted students to write in his class but felt he needed my support in doing so.  I jumped at the chance to work interdisciplinarily.  We acknowledged that we came into the writing assignment with different expectations, so we communicated early and often about what we were asking of the students, how we would comment on the drafts, and how we would eventually grade the final product. 

Interestingly, the history teacher commented more on grammatical issues than I did, just as McLeod found to be true in her work.  The content of the papers was historically-based, but I was still able to ask students to expand on particular issues that I didn’t understand.  I suppose in that regard the paper assignment was more “authentic” in that the students believed they knew more than at least one of the teachers (me) . . . many actually did not as I was a history minor in college and they were only 15 years old.  However, they didn’t know my background, so when I asked them to write in such a way that explained their position in more detail than their history teacher required, they did so for my sake.  Further, students were able to see cross-curricular expectations–what they did in history mattered to me, and what they were learning in English about topic sentences, transitions, and citing their history teacher also cared about. 

Besides creating a more relevant writing experience for students, this project was extremely insightful for both teachers.  I learned a little about historical writing and a lot about the content, but my biggest lesson was in how to identify and communicate to others my own unwritten and unspoken “rules” for writing, rules with which I’d wrongly assumed most other disciplines shared.  My history counterpart afterwards spoke about how much he’d learned about how to communicate on weaknesses in organization and elaboration, as well as a few comma and citing rules.  Highly worthwhile, but a lot of work! 

I was very lucky to work with a teacher who desired and respected writing, but many non-English teachers see WAC as a chore and don’t take the time to communicate common expectations and methodology.  Often what happens in high schools is teachers of other departments are told they must teach writing, but they are not trained in the pedagogy nor do they have a vested interest in doing so.  For example, our PE department agreed to require writing of students, but they provide little instruction (not that we English teachers would relish relinquishing this control).  Further, the assessment is often haphazard at most . . . students claim some of the teachers don’t even read the papers, others deduct points for grammatical issues we in English wouldn’t, and some contradict what English teachers teach as basic organizational structure.  Who can blame the students for being confused?  This is not WAC, for students are not truly learning or communicating through writing. 

I am meeting this summer to further discuss interdisciplinary teaching with two members (science and social studies) of my freshman academy team, and I will certainly bring forward some ideas for journaling and double-entry notebooks, both of which I use in my own classes.  I will have to rely on them, therefore, for teaching me their expectations within their own disciplines.  For one, the science teacher and I are going to work on teaching kids how to write a lab report, something which I haven’t written since high school.  I know now that I have a lot to learn, for I couldn’t successfully teach this particular type of writing tomorrow if I needed to.  We as teachers need to read more outside own own disciplines, talk with other teachers, make visible for students unwritten expectations, and acknowledge the rules we teach are not steadfast in every discipline.  I’m interested to pursue this in my own teaching, for I know I’m failing my College Writing students in this regard . . . I’m only teaching from my own perspective, based on my own college classes, and using my own expectations and biases.  Scary.

I just left this as a comment to Nan’s initial post for A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, but now I’m thinking I was to create an original post.  Is this what you want, Bradley?  Or would this informal response be more appropriate left in the comment/reply section?

I was really drawn to Howard’s essay on collaborative writing.

Collaborative writing: Howard references Charlotte Thralls in claiming all writing is collaborative if the writer accounts for how the audience will react to his/her writing. In this sense, I wish my students were more collaborative, and my brain is swirling with ways to increase collaboration in class. Too many of my students write for me alone, not considering any goals of their writing beyond a grade. They do not seem to consider or care about how their writing will make others feel or how the writing process itself is a step towards personal understanding.

As of right now, I use minimal collaboration in my College Writing class, some invention and some peer-response. I’ve found that the most successful form of peer-response is not the written peer-editing but the method of having students read aloud their essays in hopes of illiciting comments from the class. Howard’s essay presents this approach as more effective than the typical peer-edit, where the student takes on the “teacher” role, determining right and wrong, rather than the role of the reader. How, though, is the teacher/student to react when the answer to the question “How did the writing make you feel?” is “Bored”? How does the teacher facilitate a safe community where students can balance honesty and sincerity with respect and empathy?

I absolutely believe that to work together leads to understanding. I have never asked students to do any collaborative writing, mainly due to my anticipation of the problems Howard suggests, but I’m willing to give it a shot. My experience in writing curriculum this year within a larger academy of teachers presented the same issues collaborative writing presents: we had difficulty with equal work loads, with bruised egos, and with emotional attachment. However, the process was certainly worth the risks, and the product in the end was by far better than what each of us on our own would have created.

I have a lot more to say, but my laptop battery is dying . . . I think I might pursue collaborative writing as a potential topic for this summer. I have much practical experience with how I and other teachers have attempted collaboration through writing, both successfully and unsuccessfully, and the study will help me in developing curriculum for next year as well.

Battery’s dying . . .

Perhaps you’ve received your texts and have already started reading “Guide.” I’ve only read the first essay on process pedagogy, but already think this book will be useful for all of us. There is an essay toward the back about writing centers, so that should help me.

Since I’m surrounded (happily) by teachers in this class, I look forward to picking all your brains. I’ve never studied pedagogy, so tell me what you think about process pedagogy, as discussed in the first essay. As the essay unfolded, I finally started to understand the difference in how I was taught to write and what my children experienced in school during the 1980s and 1990s. We have butted heads for years. All the lack of structure and freedom to “create” that they seem to enjoy has annoyed the heck out of me. I wanted them to have to write a decent five-paragraph essay with proper grammar, etc., as I had to do. BUT, apparently I was out of step with the educational process in vogue during their school years. In my opinion, the result is that none of them can write well. For instance, as I was finishing reading the essay in “Guide” last night, my high school senior wanted to read me an assignment from her college writing class–a children’s book that she and another girl authored with barely any narrative and very few pages. They got 100/100. I was floored. But is that type of thing part of process pedagogy? Am I a complete fossil to expect that she should know to stick with one verb tense throughout a piece or that colored pictures can’t take the place of actual writing? Is process pedagogy still considered the way to go, or as the author suggests, has it been tempered with a little old-fashioned structure?

One other question; then I’ll climb off the soapbox: how do you feel about peer review, which according to the essay seems to be a significant part of process pedagogy? I don’t like peer review. Never have. I don’t feel I have ever received any truly honest feedback, let alone any brilliant criticism to help me edit. How do you feel? Can you use it to advantage in a classroom?

Looking forward to your comments…Nan