Theme For English B
The instructor said:
Go home and write
a page tonight
And let that page come out of you,
And it will be true. …
- Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes conveys simply what I like to refer to as “original” writing. This philosophical overview of our department’s writing program is essentially about asking students to think and to write clearly, effectively and originally. We begin with basic “backward design” questions about outcomes. What do we want our student writers to know, to do and to value? A response to this question should be comprehensive (in each student’s four years here) and specific (in each student’s grade level).
Comprehensively, we want the English writing curriculum to develop students who know:
- Good writing
- Strategies for understanding good writing
- Strategies for constructing clear, effective, and original written communication
Comprehensively, we want the English writing curriculum to develop students who can:
- Write correct sentences
- Write unified, coherent and adequately developed paragraphs
- Write unified, coherent and adequately developed multiple paragraph compositions
- Write for a variety of purposes
- Write for a variety of audiences
- Write to communicate clearly, effectively, and originally
Comprehensively, we want the English writing curriculum to develop students who value:
- Writing’s primacy in discovering and identifying ideas
- Writing’s role in constructing understanding of subject matter
- The significant role of writers in advancing cultural values and identity
- The significant role of writing in the process of learning to understand
- The process of writing to communicate clearly, effectively, and originally
The best learning requires active language-making. The best learning has a social component. The best learning includes a reflective component. Writing is an efficient way for all in a group to be active simultaneously. Writing allows thinking to be public, and therefore to be shared. Writing is an ideal technology for reflection. (Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking)
Writing-to-learn does not try to improve writing, but learning; however, better writing usually follows.
Probative, generative thinking is foundational to a person’s capacity to improve as a learner. Writing to clarify this kind of thinking is informal and is not intended for an audience. Formal writing is actively arranging written words to argue, explain or to analyze for an audience.
The English department has attempted to simply delineate the value of writing as a tool for learning; it has not attempted to iterate its artistic value, nor its pedestrian transactional value. For our purposes, Hill students are well served when the English department gives centralized emphasis to writing in our curricular structures and becomes dynamically imaginative in its uses of writing. Our goal is to inspire, through the productive balance of writing and reading skill development, a confident learner possessed with the authority to command language.
Because writing is by nature a solitary act, and because we ask students to write regularly in the service of learning, understanding, and creating; the English department routinely replenishes its instructional palette of informal writing “colors.” Writing informally, akin to sketching and exploring with brush strokes and colors, inherently gives students permission to fail – privately. Further, implementing regular informal writing into our curricular structure means that learning becomes increasingly student – centered. Writing to learn is in the service of learning; it does not primarily serve literature, but it will improve the student’s ability to read. Here, we are informed by the words of author and teacher Peter Elbow: “The most productive and generative act by a teacher or parent is often to listen. In short, most parents instinctively know that their job is to get children to start with output, not input – start with writing, not reading.” (Peter Elbow, The War Between Reading and Writing)
Ritualizing informal writing in and out of our classrooms is an important step toward centralizing writing- to-learn in our curriculum.
Next, when the solitary act of writing becomes public, when all those slippery symbols have been properly arranged and manipulated, and when learners have created for themselves language essential to their personal understanding intended for another person, that’s when writing becomes high-stakes and formal. Generally, formal writing in our department is used to display memory and test mastery of a literary theory of some kind. Our time as teachers deconstructing texts, synthesizing literary epochs, and organizing information into systemic knowledge is returned to us in the form of in-class essay tests, the multiple paragraph expository essay and the literary analysis. Here, the student is under the gun to perform two higher-order cognitive tasks.
On one hand, she needs to organize and clarify her understanding of someone else’s writing, likely to include recognition of tone, rhetorical strategies, character development, motifs, cultural nuance and symbolism. On the other hand, she needs to demonstrate considerable compositional acuity herself. This is the paradox of marrying a good deal of a student’s formal writing to test her understanding and appreciation of reading.
This paradox compels the English department to broaden our approach to formal writing. The “problematic banking metaphor of learning: the assumption that students are empty vessels to be filled” (Peter Elbow), is a constraint we work at detaching ourselves from; by giving equal emphasis to writing, students are invited to use formal writing to make meaning. The process of a student making meaning from reading has remarkable social implications; it can be shared publicly in forums of other students. Formal student writing for public consumption ought to be for a broad audience of learners, in and out of the classroom. Establishing appropriate classroom culture is an important component here. Formal writing should be structured so students can experience how written meaning is achieved through a process of thinking, drafting trial text, revision, social negotiation with peers and teachers, and composition.
The inevitable benefit of students making meaning – generating output as readers – is their appreciation for the complicated process “real” writers struggle with.
Also, our courses, from English 1 through English 4 honors, strive to be “fifty fifty” (Peter Elbow) courses; whatever we are doing at each level, we go back and forth constantly between reading and writing; neither one is felt as a “handmaiden” to the other. And as teachers, we need to commit significant energy and mindfulness to crafting meaningful writing assignments. Prompts that generate interesting writing and critical thinking have four features:
- They motivate students by challenging them intellectually.
- They accurately express the appropriate cognitive functions teachers expect (synthesize, analyze, evaluate).
- They clearly indicate the specific rhetorical problem: the subject, the audience, and the purpose for the writing.
- They make the criteria for evaluating the paper clear.
And ideally, they progress developmentally through the semesters and years, each building on the relevant skills of those that went before. (Rhonda Flaxman, Ph.D. Creating Meaningful Assignments)
References: Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking; Peter Elbow, The War Between Reading and Writing; Rhonda Flaxman, Ph.D., Creating Meaningful Assignments.