Writing Across the Curriculum

I found this weeks' readings to be very helpful in envisioning and creating a culture of critical and creative writing and reading within the classroom. Having entered the class a bit confused as to how writing and reading are not the fundamental basics of all curriculum, I can now understand the different approached to reading and writing, and how emphasis on skill can change based on assignment.

I found the idea of "writing to learn", through use of ungraded writing assignments and/or personal journals to "encourage students to explore and develop their thoughts on paper" could be very helpful from an evaluation standpoint; as students will be given a chance to more independently and privately express their concerns, worries, anticipations, and questions they have about the topics covered or to soon be covered in a curriculum. "Writing as a form of social behavior in the academic community" through group work, collaborative projects, and writing intensive courses also can encourage though, while also exposing students to writing and reading content both beyond and below their own skill. By working with peers and peer reviewing, students can gauge their own reading and writing skills, understanding though exposure how and why their work can improve or how/why they exhibit more mastery and competence of the written language than other students. Writing as a form of social behavior will also allow students to police themselves, to interact and give constructive criticism without reiterating only what the teacher has implied, and to help their peers excel in reading and writing.

In my classroom, I hope to attack the 'literacy crisis' by listening to what students want to read about, and providing them academic articles about these topics to annotate, find main ideas, summarize, ask and answer questions about, and link back to the classroom curriculum. I will also have one in class essay test per unit, to try and eradicate students' dependence on computer spell check, dictionary, and thesaurus. While this might be overwhelming to some students at first, by mid year, students should be able to understand and deliver 'good writing' considering the topic and time limit. To encourage redrafting and reworking old ideas, I would allow students to rewrite these essays at home for increased credit after tests have been given back.

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In relating Elbow's essay to my practice, I found the following two statements of most significance:
"clarity is not what we start with, but what we work toward" and "nothing can be read unless it was first written". I think I have somewhat incorporated this idea into my current curriculum, by asking students at the beginning of our first unit (astronomy) to fill out a "What I Know/ What I want to Know/ What I Learned" chart. When introducing the unit, I asked my students to write down all the terms they believed would be covered in Astronomy and things they already knew about, and then I read aloud multiple objectives for the unit as overview. Given this list, students were asked to write down things they wanted to know more about, with the assumption we would spend more time on those topics so long as it fit into the curriculum, and that additional articles on topics we would not have time to touch on in class could be read and summarized for extra credit. Lastly, at the end of the unit students will be asked to fill out the "what I learned" section, most likely in outline form of the unit before the unit test.

Oral vs. Written

My question: Why not preserve and protect? Why change?

 

As technology pushes us towards an increasingly written culture, and away from our previously oral traditions, the character and power of particular places begins to weaken. Writing down oral stories, over time, makes them independent of the environment in which they stemmed, rendering them separate from the actual places where the events in the stories occurred. The specific people and places in the stories are no longer needed for recollection, so what once stood as cultural preservation now becomes a subjective backdrop. Writing in this sense, has contributed to the loss of differentiated sense of place, and perhaps muted the sensory experience of storytelling.

Gee’s article explains that “words are connected more to knowledge and beliefs, encapsulated into the stories or theories that constitute cultural models, then they are to definitions”. As oral tales become written stories, modified, edited, and even rewritten, the original meaning behind the words themselves as they relate to the context in the story begins to change. The ancestral understandings and viewpoints of a once verbal story, expressed through culturally specific articulation and vocabulary, can now be changed to meet the needs of other people with different ideas and a separate understanding of terminology. Instead of new readers being shaped by the cultural history of the story, in particular by the language and dialect used, and feeling an impact as such; the readers can instead project their own ideas into the story, use their own sense of linguistics, and thus shape the story closer to their own personal and cultural norms or ideals.

Contrary to Gee’s statement that “languages are always deteriorating over time because uneducated people and other debilitating social forces change them”, I would argue that the powerful—those with the ability to read and write, to have access to technology to create written culture, are those who are deteriorating language. If those in power cling to “correct/proper English” when both speaking and writing, in their translation of oral stories to written stories, culturally significant and locale specific vocabulary will be lost. This not only frees the story from its origin, it condemns it to monotonous retelling through the culturally accepted linguistics of the time.

COMING SOON:

‘sausage’ term and how food vocabulary is still an issue today

“how far can a company stretch the  meaning of the word?”

·      Cage free

·      Low calorie

·      Natural flavor