What use is blogging?

The blogging experience has been great for this class.  I don’t think I have ever done so much enjoyable, useful, low stakes writing as I have for this class.  Most importantly, the writings were useful to me as a student of comp theory.  The ones that were the most useful were those where I posted “take-aways” for a particular paper, chapter or book that we were working on in class.  This allowed (forced) me to engage more deeply with the texts, but also the product was a useful tool later in the semester when I had to go back to refer to that content when preparing papers.  A  second type of blog assignment, where we had to either post a plan-in-progress for our unit plan, or we had to discuss some topic related to the theory we were discussing that week, was also pretty useful. 

The social aspect of blogging is also nice, for some of the same reasons.  It was interesting and actually valuable to see what others thought were important points of our readings.  It was also nice to get to know the other students in an online context. 

One piece of advice I might give (and remember for myself) is that it might have been better if the instructor had reminded us from time to time why we were blogging these “take-aways,” summaries and  reader responses.  I sometimes got caught up in the moment with all the reading, so the information that I wrote about was sometimes not as useful to me as it could have been if I’d been able to keep my perspective, with the final project still far on the horizon.  By keeping the needs of the final unit plan in mind, I might have annotated and responded to the readings in ways that would have been more valuable at the end of the semester.

Argument for Integrated Reading and Writing

Dear English Department,

I think it would be in the interests of our students if we offered an integrated reading/writing course at the basic English level.

As of now, we are offering a reading course and a writing course.  In the last decade or so many composition researchers have convincingly argued that students will become better readers and writers if they are taught these subjects using an integrated methodology. 

In the literature, composition researchers have reported many beneficial effects of teaching reading and writing in an integrated classroom.  Goen and Gillote-Tropp (2003) state that understanding one process can help the learning of the other.  Sandra Stotsky (1984, as reported by Goen and Gillote-Tropp) has noticed that better writers not only tend to be better readers, but also tend to just read  more than poor writers.  Salvatori (1996) has noted that introspective reading has a stimulative effect on IRW students’ writing; furthermore, Petrosky (1982) has noted that practicing writing has improved his IRW students’ reading development.  McCormick (1994), however, has noted that if reading and writing are taught separately, these beneficial effects are lost.

Goen and Gillote-Tropp (2003) report that students who spent a year in an IRW course at San Francisco State University successfully completed the course and the CSU at a rate of 97%, 13% higher than students who attended a traditional course (84%).  Students in the SFSU IRW course also scored higher term final reading evaluations and writing than students in the traditional course.  Beside superior scores, students from the IRW course indicated in self evaluations that they felt more confident in their reading, writing and learning skill.  Further, these students passed second year reading and writing courses at a higher rate than those students who attended the traditional course (97% compared to 90%). In later years, these scores went up even higher, indicating a comprehensive and sustained improvement of student learning outcomes, and perhaps more importantly, student success.

I would like to think that my goal as a composition instructor is not only to get a student to read critically and write convincingly, but also to analyze the way that he or she thinks about the world.  McCormick states that reading should not just be something we do before we write, and writing should not just be something that we do after reading.  We, as instructors, should think of reading

…as an analogue for thinking about  one's  own and  others' thinking, about  how one's thinking  ignites and is ignited  by the thoughts of others, [and] justifies the presence of reading in composition classrooms not as  a pretext but as  a context for writing. (1994)

I hope you will seriously consider my recommendation to establish an basic skills integrated reading and writing course at our institution.  I truly believe it is the best for our students and their future.

KGZ, Discovery of Competence, Ch. 7

Reading Chapter 7, Extending Competence, made me want to read Chapter 6.  I have not had the time to do so yet, but I think that chapter will be important for me in my planning for my teaching unit.  That said, the main ideas of the chapter are as follows (at least as I understood them):

• Literature is not only written, but also spoken.  As teachers, we can use the spoken stories that students have heard in their family or friend circles as a way to help students understand how we “make meaning” in our everyday lives. 
• This helps students see themselves as tellers and interpreters of the world around them.
• We all command a range of styles of language use. 
• The way we use language is dependent on what discourse community we are working in. 
• Academia is just one example of a discourse community; by helping a student look at his/her own discourse community and the standards in it, we can help him/her understand the academic style of language.
• This supports students’ development of interpretive and figurative ways of thinking.
• It also supports a multicultural curriculum.

The authors have the students collect narratives that are told in their family.  The students record them and transcribe them as spoken, and then look at their stories.  As they look closely at all their stories, they start to notice patterns in purpose, style and form. They discuss these patterns in an essay.

I really like the ideas presented in this chapter, and will probably use some of them in the unit that Leslie and I are planning.  The idea of collecting family stories is a great one as it does so many things: it validates the stories as just as important as “real literature”; students will be motivated to work on these stories, since they are their own; it brings in each person’s culture, making the class truly multicultural; it highlights the differences between different discourse communities, specifically the differences in the way stories are told in their home discourse community and that of academia; it allows students to think about audience and shared knowledge. 

We were thinking of doing something similar to this, where the final paper for the unit would be written in two dialects, the students’ home dialect and the academic dialect.  This chapter gives us some structure and some theoretical reasons to do so.