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.