My Educational Philosophy
Establishing the Authority of Student Authors
A quick Google search for the term “writing” turns up innumerable quotes by professional writers issuing their perspective on writing – how to do it, what makes it effective, and why to do it. My role as a teacher of writing is similar to what it was (and is) as a student of writing – to forget all this advice and to help my students do the same. This may seem counter-intuitive; after all, these experienced writers certainly have worthwhile lessons to offer. But for the student writer, the most useful lesson of all is learning to establish and value one’s own authority with regard to his or her text.
Everything I do in a classroom is geared to that end – for students to understand the worth of their writing and the substantial effects it can and will have on the complex ecology into which it is born. To do this, I guide students in honing tools that will increase their confidence. Through working with diverse learners, from teens in foster care to developmentally delayed adults as well as ESL students, AP students and those with learning disabilities, I have become apt at differentiating lessons and assignments to meet each person’s distinct learning style, interests, and backgrounds. My experiences made me keenly aware of learners’ unique personal and social trials and affirmed my desire to help each individual develop attainable, personalized goals aimed at stretching the bounds of their former skills and knowledge. I firmly believe that every student in my class must grow, regardless of where she or he begins.
Rebecca Moore Howard, in Authorship in Composition Studies, points out that for too long we’ve denied student writers the respect typically allotted to professional authors. She shares Debra Hawhee’s lament that students are “perceived as meek and needy, incapable of processing much more than terse commands” (10). By privileging the canonized Author over the student, literacy creates and reinforces a hierarchy (11-12).
While increasing student confidence seems a cliché of the education system, Cathy N. Davidson, in Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century, explains the complexity and significance of this statement:
Unlearning requires that you take an inventory of your current
repertoire of skills, and that you have the confidence to see
your shortcomings and repair them. Without confidence in
your ability to learn something new, it is almost impossible to
see what you have to change in order to succeed against a
new challenge…Confidence in your ability to learn is
confidence in your ability to unlearn, to switch assumptions or
methods or partnerships in order to do better. (86)
Confidence isn’t simply a matter of making students feel good about themselves (though I do hope this for my students as well). But equally significant is that confidence is a necessary foundation for learning.
This social justice campaign is based on an assignment designed by Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber in their article “Ecological, Pedagogical, Public Rhetoric.” They suggest asking students to produce situated writing by creating a public advocacy campaign involving multiple texts aimed at different audiences so as to “invoke the multimodal and collaborative aspect of twenty-first-century communication” (203). While some may worry that this approach marks a departure from standard academic essays, Rivers and Weber insist that “the intertextual nature of the documents, nevertheless, requires the same engaged, complex, and long-term thinking as more traditional academic essays. The complexity …comes…from how texts and acts articulate and permeate across time and space” (208). Particularly challenge is the writer’s responsibility to coordinate the different texts that s/he is producing.
Kathleen Blake Yancey’s book Reflection in the Writing Classroom highlights the usefulness of reflection for both student and teacher. Before student reflection, composition teachers couldn’t for certain say how one learns to write, especially from a student’s perspetctive (2), but reflective assignments allow us to ask our students how they learn to write. Because students have authority over their texts, Yancey believes (as do I) that they can speak knowledgably and thoughtfully about their writing. This not only helps teachers design more effective lessons, but also allows students to become “agents of their own learning,” according to Yancey. Reflection is also directly helpful to students in that it allows “revision of one’s goals, or more often, revision of one’s work (Camp 1992; Weiser); it can mean self-assessment, sometimes oriented to the gap between intention and accomplishment (Conway)” (6). In this way, reflection shapes both writing and the writer, asking students to get to know their texts more intimately.
This line of questioning follows Sheridan Blau’s model of a “literature workshop” in his book The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and their Readers. Blau observes when teachers arrive in class ready to explain a challenging text, students assume the teacher is smarter and just knows more, and they worry that they are simply incompetent. Blau points out that this is an illusion: “The difference between us, I realized,… lay largely if not entirely in our roles and in what we saw ourselves responsible for”(2). Blau concluded that “If my job was to ensure that my students were learning as much as possible, then I had to find ways to switch roles with them” (2). Blau’s literature workshop, in which students identify an “interpretive problem” (12) and articulatetheir thinking about the problem (13), is one way to achieve this.
Fostering Higher-Order Thinking Skills
Instructors frequently talk about giving students chances to use their creativity and problem-solving capabilities, to employ 21st-century skills. However, it’s not enough to provide students with opportunities to use these skills; we must teach them (and ourselves) how to do so through scaffolded activities aimed at slowly practicing these abilities in varied writing contexts. For example, in my AP Language and Composition course, we discussed Dava Sobel’s analogy “Time is to clock as mind is to brain” from Longitude, exploring if this analogy ‘worked’ and why it fit the content and style of her book. We then examined a host of other analogies and attempted to pinpoint what made them effective or ineffective and what functions they served. In this way, students observed that even professional writers sometimes make ineffective decisions. From there, students began to compose their own analogies by choosing an invention significant to the 21st century that would parallel the chronometer’s significance to the 18th century. They then collaborated with one another to begin brainstorming shared characteristics that the analogy might address, and finally, they developed their analogy in essay form. In just this one lesson sequence, my students found themselves practicing a range of higher-level thinking skills, from analyzing and evaluating others’ texts to applying their understanding of analogies to create their own. But the key was that they honed these skills in a ‘safe’ environment where they could develop and challenge their thoughts through collaboration with me and their peers, but without the threat of judgment that letter and number grades connote.
Situating Students and Their Writing
As a teacher, I recognize the limits of my own assumed authority, and thus, I know I cannot possibly foresee and prepare my students for the particular circumstances and exigencies that they will encounter. Instead, I can only lead them through diverse situated writing assignments, particularly ones aimed at the digital realm, to help them learn to adapt their writing and thinking skills to varied genres, audiences, situations, and subjects. This might involve students developing their own social justice campaigns and engaging in conversations with others advocating for change. Students could then post on a relevant online discussion board, email leaders at related nonprofits, and write a letter to the editor of the local Patch. And at each step in the process, I would ask that students stop and consider the implications of changing genres and audiences. I am committed to integrating reflection as a reoccurring part of the composing process. By asking students to closely examine their own writing and develop metacognitive skills, students will learn about and construct and reconstruct their identities and texts. Suddenly, what the teacher thinks isn’t the primary force shaping a text; what they think matters too.
Developing Literary Authority, too
Though I thoroughly enjoy exploring exciting, fascinating, strange and wonderful pieces of literature – both fiction and non-fiction - with my students, I am, at my core, a writing teacher, or more aptly put, I am a writer so passionate about the craft that I wish to share it with others. My own professional and academic experiences with writing affect all that I do, including how I teach literature. I lead students in questioning previous assumptions about the reader-author relationship, so that they can understand how both play a part in composing a text.
My students and I also practice reading literature ecologically. In other words, we consider how other texts, a writer’s lived experiences and relationships, and the very materials with which the writer writes influence a piece of literature. Then we turn to the reader. I use the Socratic Method to help my students develop metacognitive habits wherein they become aware of how they read and interpret a piece of literature. I directly ask my students, “What are the difficult parts of this text? Why are these parts challenging? What are the different ways we could read this? What evidence do we have to support these different options? Why might the author have written this part in this way? How does it serve the text as a whole?” In this way, students facing a difficult text won’t walk away from it; instead, they’ll be able to articulate what is problematic about the it and employ strategies to begin interpreting and discovering potential answers to these ‘problems’. This serves as critical preparation for the kind of problem-solving that students will later do in their workplaces.
Lastly, in both my literature and writing classes, collaboration, whether in literature circles or by writing with a partner, is key to success. This strategy mimics the world beyond academia, and once again asks students to take ownership of not only their writing but their thoughts and ideas. This need and desire to form opinions, support those opinions with evidence, and advocate for those opinions will help my students make a life-time commitment to being equal part teacher and learner.