Where Does the Responsibility Lie?

If I had a teacher like Will Brown for chemistry as described in Schoenbach and Greenleaf’s “Fostering Adolescents’ Engaged Academic Literacy,” I might have actually taken it at some point in high school or college. Instead, I shied away from challenging course like chemistry because I feared not succeeding. Brown not only taught the content material for chemistry, more importantly, he taught text-based problem-solving skills his students could take into any classroom. From the first day, he creates a learning atmosphere that acknowledges the students will not know the answers all the time, and that’s okay.

By modeling for the students how to read complicated chemistry articles, the students learn more than just chemistry. They learn how to “(1) clarify any confusing words or ideas, (2) ask questions that come to mind about the science, and (3) summarize as he read before moving on” (102). I would imagine that many chemistry teachers would balk at the notion of teaching metacognitive reading strategies. After all, how is that their responsibility? Who should teach it?

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Summary: “The Thirty-Eight-or-So Five-Paragraph Essay (The Dagwood)” by Alfredao Celedon Lujan

Lujan discusses how the five-paragraph essay is what we teach and use to assess, but our texts use five-paragraph essays that are sometimes forty-two paragraphs long. From the time students walk into his class, Lujan reminds them their “paper has been in process their whole lives” (143) because as they are experiencing life they are developing their perspective, voice, and story.

Drawing on Vigotsky’s “zone of proximal development” (142) and a Dagwood, “multilayered sandwiches that Dagwood Bumstead, from the comic strip Blondie, was fond of” (149), Lujan proposes the student start by gathering the inside of a sandwich and build out from there. Much like White, Lujan believes that the five-paragraph essay does not promote creativity and reflection. Instead, the students feel compelled to follow a formula that they won’t necessarily use later.

This pastiche does not adhere to one genre. Yet, ultimately it still has a “middle (of course), beginning, and end” (153). This assignment requires the student to reflect on what they have written or considered before and how it fits now. Lujan even includes a sample pastiche that includes an introduction of the author, actual quiz questions and answers from the course, lyrics, reflective journal entries and more. Of course, there was also a short concluding paragraph to signal the end and summarize the semester’s work. Honestly, the pastiche seemed quite disjointed.

Summary: “My Five-Paragraph Theme Theme” by Edward M. White

Without citing literacy theory, White discusses how the five-paragraph essay stifles the development of writers. He concedes that the five-paragraph essay is a great way for students to develop some sort of organizational structure but with that comes a student applying a formula rather than truly writing, or more importantly, becoming a writer.

He suggests that we have students “spend some time with narrative structures that respond to assignments calling for telling about a personal experience and what it means to the writer—and, possibly, the reader” (140). Through this approach the student should then be able to indicate the reasons in a more compelling manner. Other writing strategies should be mastered and incorporated too such as compare/contrast because at least this strategy would force the writer to consider more than just getting a good grade through illustration.

White is not suggesting that we abandon the five-paragraph essay. Instead we should approach how we teach it for what it is, a way to pass essay tests. After mastering that, we need to teach them to be writers.

Summary: “College-Level Writing and the Liberal Arts Tradition” by Edward M. White

First, White acknowledges that college-level writing is sometimes and sometimes not happening in college. And sometimes it’s happening in high school. White challenges the readers of this book to truly consider “What characteristics clearly must be present in writing for us to call it college level?” (296). It’s not just or always in a college classroom.

He claims that college students “fail to write college-level papers because that they have nothing to say, particularly when they stand in the shadows of their sources” (296). In college, students are just learning how to use sources to support their ideas, so if they are not able to make assertions because they have not developed as writers, they fall back on what they did in high school: summarizing and/or plagiarizing.

Finally, White discusses how because high school learning is test-focused, writing assignments are more clear. When students finally get to college with college-writing rooted in liberal arts tradition, they are challenged to “move out of their comfort zone into new ways of thinking about complex matters” ( 298).

Incorporating Technology Interaction

Deciding to come back to graduate school to retake much of the same coursework for a second master’s degree wasn’t easy, but it is one of the best choices I have ever made. The last time I took this course, we broke into groups and using construction paper, scissors, and markers, we constructed a web page with links. In the end, the project looked like crude popup books, each group inventing their own way to illustrate how a link connects and opens. We were still marveling at how the Internet worked, but not really thinking about how we–and our students–worked with it.

Through Selber’s Mutliliteracies theoretical framework I would like to explore how I can incorporate projects in my college-level writing courses that consider how the students and technology interact. Selber claims, “students need access to tenure-line faculty members who specialize in the study of literacy and computers, articulated English courses that take up the cultural complications of computer technologies” (131). Rather than just coming up with projects using the next technological fad, I want the students to learn to use technology and consider its ramifications.

 

L1 to L2

Harklau and Pinnow’s “Adolescent Second-Language Writing” serves as an excellent source of what future research is needed. Most teachers are currently facing or will be facing second-language (L2) writers in their classrooms. We need more research to know how to better serve this population because “our dependence on monolingual models of teaching and learning literacy leads us to define L2 writing merely as a problem or a L2 deficit, rather than considering writers’ entire repertoires and resources” (135).

At the community college where I teach, the department is very strict and does not want the composition instructors to keep L2 learners in our classrooms unless they have truly acquired the nuances of English. We are instructed to make sure we get writing samples the first day of class in case anyone “slipped through the system.” It’s as if they are saying “these people” are trying to get away with something. How about seeing it as “falling through the cracks” instead? Better yet, how about providing us with basic professional development on how to best work with this population in our monolingual classrooms? The attitude seems to be that they aren’t ready for your class yet, leave it to us.

But are the ESL courses they are relegated to holding their interest? Do these students learn to develop texts in L2 or are they relying on L1 and then using resources like teacher editing and translation dictionaries to refine L2 texts? And if they do “make it” into our composition classrooms, just how should we teach or develop their writing process? We say that no single writing process is right or correct because it is different for everyone, but is thinking in one language to develop the content and then converting that same content to another language a valid process? Should we encourage otherwise?

The research is still out on that one.