Archive for the ‘teaching writing’ tag
Teaching Writing: My Philosophy
Basically, my philosophy is that purpose must be made explicit, authentic writing should be integrated, process-oriented and collaborative, and both writing and teaching can delight, as well as instruct. Above all else, students must know why writing is important.
Unless students understand what effective writing can do for them in their real lives, writing assignments will remain little more than busy work, artificial assignments to prove that they have read and understood a text or mastered a particular form, and compositions courses will be just another hurdle to be surmounted on their way to graduation, instead of one of the most important classes in their careers. Student writers must experience firsthand how clear, exact, detailed, persuasive writing can give them power, yes power, in their academic, professional and even personal lives. Read the rest of this entry »
“Educational Blogging”: An Article by Geoffrey Middlebrook
Over 112 million blogs crowd the blogosphere, mostly self-referential blogs about personal experience. Geoffrey C. Middlebrook argues that blogs can be used for advanced writing courses, since they conform to current student-centered, active learning models. It is a space that writers can develop their voice and explore their interests “in a medium that appears to have life and longevity,” offering the potential of a wide and authentic audience and for developing a students’ disciplinary and professional identity, “an incipient sense of self in the discourses of one’s field.” Blogs can empower students, stimulate the initiative to write, engender information sharing, help reputation building and facilitate personal expression. He insists that his students adhere to the course objectives to “write clear, grammatical, well-structured prose; discover and convey complex ideas critically; appreciate the nuances of good argument; identify and speak to specific audiences in a voice of authority and persuasiveness; and address the academic, public, and professional aspects of writing within disciplines and career fields.” Although some may argue that Blogs may actually harm reputations, Middlebrook’s students have won awards and received high-level job offers. However, he warns that in a recent study students appreciated the use of technology when used effectively, but felt it was a waste of time when managed poorly or poorly integrated into the class.
Teaching Writing Offline (With Online Support)
Even though Scott Warnock’s book Teaching Writing Online: How & Why focuses on writing classes that take place entirely over the internet and hybrid classes which are about half online and half in person, any writing teacher in the digital age can glean important advice from his book on how to update and enhance their own teaching practices. Here are some suggestions I thought I would adopt and, in many cases, adapt, with comments and musings about why they are significant.
Multiple Simultaneous Drafts: Google.docs and Writing
When I started the master’s program last year at San Francisco State, a friend introduced me — against my will — to Google docs. (Now listen, he insisted, this will make it much easier to write and print out your work.) I now use Google docs for almost all of my writing, including creative writing.
The Draft is Obsolete: The Word Processor and the Writing Process
The concept of the draft is obsolete, in both academic and creative writing, if drafting is seen as a process of rewriting a work anew, recreating and reforming what has already been written in a wholly new text. A “draft” these days is one point at which writing is saved or printed out. Writing now consists of changing a single, fluid text that grows, contracts and changes (as is happening to this post even now, if you could only see it happening as I do). Writing classes that teach first draft, second draft and final draft and do not show students how to use the word processor to revise a text are outdated.
Technobabble: The Digital Life of Ronosaurus (Writing and Teaching with New Technologies)
Not sure how to begin the story of how I came to be sitting here with my laptop at Cafe Abir (just a moment, let me pick up my triple latte), writing a technoliteracy autobiography, but I will just get started and see what comes out. I can always fix things — make that, revise — later. After all, this changing piece of writing, which is morphing under my fingertips even now, is the climax of the story I wish to tell, the story of how my own composition process has changed because of digital technology and how that should affect the way I teach writing.
“HOT Blogging”: An Article by Lisa Zawilinski
Zawilinski’s article “HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking” gives an excellent overview of the potential benefits of blogs in the classroom for teaching Higher Order Thinking (HOT). She claims that the Internet is this generation’s defining technology for literacy and that this population is both self-guided and in need of guidance. Classroom blogs help bridge the gap between out-of-school literacies and in-school literacies, and most importantly provide an authentic audience for student work. Blogging can help develop online reading comprehension as students are asked to analyze and critically evaluate information, synthesize across multiple texts and communicate with others. She identifies four types of classroom blogs: Classroom News Blog (syllabus, homework assignments, updates), Mirror Blogs (quotes, impressions, reflections, new ideas), Literature Response Blogs (question and response, summary, synthesis), and Showcase Blogs (student works in various media published). Integrating the blog into classwork could include these steps: Bolstering the Background (finding out what students already know, research projects on author and time period, lists of resources), Priming the Pump (first impressions, summaries, confusions clarifies, connections to themselves, other texts or the world), Continuing the Conversation (summarizing and synthesizing across multiple textual units and classroom discussion), and Making Multiplicity Explicit (requiring students to address others’ comments and respond with evidence and clear explanations).
Zawilinski, Lisa. “HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking.” Reading Teacher (not yet published). University of Connecticut. New Literacies Team. Web. 7 March 2010.
Consider Your Audience
Recently a professor told me to consider my audience. She said that my style was far too informal for a grad paper. I needed to consider what writing was appropriate for academic discourse. Academic discourse? Who did she think I was writing to? She was my only reader. I felt, then, that I could play around a little bit with the essay form, experiment a little. I even included a couple of allusions that only she would understand. It did not work. She wanted me, I realized, to speak into an imaginary space where scholars speak, not to each other, but into an imaginary library.
New Literacies: What are They and What Does This Mean for Writing?
What are new literacies? How do new literacies differ from old ones? How does this affect how we write and how we teach writing? To address these questions, I will look at three articles: “‘New’ Literacies: Research and Social Practice” by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies” by the same authors from the New Literacies Sampler, and “Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy” by Julia Davies and Guy Merchant, also from the New Literacies Sampler.
Who is Writing This?
I am not writing this. This blog is writing me.
I did not want — nor was I able — to write this myself. I will create a persona as I go along, let’s call him Ronosaurus, that will do the work for me, someone simpler, who does not get pimples nor have a crick in his neck (such things will not be mentioned). Not only will I simplify, I will fictionalize myself and make myself seem smarter, more well-read, wittier, and, while I am at it, better looking. But this is not a story about me, it is a story about stories. To tell it, I must invent a speaker, which I will call, for convenience, myself. The needs of the blog will determine the voice I use. If you know it is a lie and I know it is a lie, then I will be telling the truth.
