One of the biggest problems I have with writing that happens in schools is that it is not authentic. Students write because they have to, they write to a specific assignment, and the teacher is the only person who reads the writing. No wonder kids don't enjoy writing. One of my goals as a high school English teacher was for my students to think of themselves as writers by the end of the year. And to do that, they have to actually write, make decisions about their own writing, and share their writing with real people. As I read Randy Bomer's chapters on "People Who Make Things," I kept wanting to high-five him because he describes student writing that is real and purposeful.
Dr. Bomer addresses the need for a real audience; he mentions that students sometimes don't write well because they know that there is no real purpose behind the writing (p.200), and he stresses the need for publishing. I like the idea of having publishing "events" and the analogy of the teacher being like a director helping kids get ready for a play. During one personal writing unit each year, my classroom looked like what Dr. Bomer describes; students kept notebooks, met in writing groups, created and designed their own pieces, and created a class magazine at the end. The publishing day was one of my favorite of the year. But why did I not create that environment for all types of writing? Publishing really must be part of each piece of writing. Chapter 14, "Teaching Toward Participation in Digital Culture," made me think about publishing in ways I had not before. I tend to be a pen and paper kind of person, so I often forget all that we can do with our new literacies. (I am so inspired that I even tried creating links in this blog post!)
He also describes a shift in teacher thinking and purpose: "The key is to make students responsible for making decisions, but to teach actively what they need to know to make good decisions" (p.171). Rather than giving students assignments, we teach them to make their own decisions about writing. Last week in my Teaching Composition class, my writing group started talking about the difference between a prompt and an idea-generator. We thought that an idea-generator could be used anytime while a prompt could not; for example, thinking about a person (p.188) could help a writer get started writing anytime but eventually lead to their own topic while "write about the time you showed courage" could not.
When I taught more school-based forms of writing, I often gave students specific strategies, such as ways to generate ideas for a given assignment, ways to outline ideas, ways to organize different kinds of essays. One of my questions is if we teach students in a workshop model, what will be their experience when they go into a more teacher-directed classroom? Will they know how to sift through and respond to an assignment? I have been thinking quite a bit over my teaching life how to build curriculum around students, how to teach analysis in a meaningful way, and how to teach grammar in a way that doesn't make my students hate me. The kind of inquiry that I have read about in Katie Wood Ray's Study Driven and that Dr. Bomer describes in Ch. 13 has shown me a way to do each of those things.
One of the pieces of Dr. Bomer's book that I found most interesting was about language use. I wrote in an earlier post that we may need to call our subject Language Arts rather than English, and I thought that again while reading Building Adolescent Literacy. Students should use all of their languages while writing in their notebooks and for audiences. I think teachers and students do need to think about how they can use different languages to send different messages and serve different purposes. Then academic English becomes one of many possible languages, and our subject becomes less about English and more about language use.
Another favorite idea from Dr. Bomer: "Grading does not equal teaching. Furthermore, when a writer has finished a piece of writing, that's not the best moment to teach him what he needed to know to write it" (p.219). So logical but so often not the case.
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