“I want to go deep inside language together
and use it to know, shape and play with our worlds – but my practices evolve as
my students and I go deeper.” Nancie Atwell, In the Middle
In "Learning to Teach Writing," Atwell takes
us on a journey of how she began teaching as a creationist who focused on
creating curriculum to becoming an evolutionist who instead allows the
curriculum to unfold. She and her
students learn together and she teaches students what she sees they need to
learn.
While this first course reading for PED
3148 is specifically about teaching writing in the English Classroom versus
Writing Across the Curriculum, I chose it because it is above all else a
powerful story of learning. Beginning her story when she tells us “the gap was
at its widest with an eight grader who taught me that I didn’t know enough” (p.
4). Atwell describes how she moves from using a
highly prescribed, systematic ELA program that was accompanied by specific
behaviours she expected around learning and used “to manipulate students into
bearing the sole responsibility for narrowing the gap” (p. 4) of what they
didn’t know and what she expected them to learn. Sharing a story with us from
when she says the gap was at its greatest, we meet Jeff and eight grade student
who struggles with writing.
Instead of following the process of the prewriting
procedures, Jeff drew pictures and his sister helped him scribe his story at home. Despite what Atwell explains as her continual “strong disapproval” of Jeff’s approach, he persevered and was able to pass the course and move on to
high school. While it wasn’t only until years later that Atwell realized she
had to change her pedagogy to accommodate the behaviors of beginning writers
and not expect them to all find ways “to make sense of, or peace with the
language arts curriculum or ….to fail the course” (p. 4), it was the experience
of not being able to reach Jeff that became for her what Shoshana Felman calls
“trouble around the text.” In later reading what she revisited to learn when
Jeff was in her class, that sitting behind the big desk in the front of the
classroom and following a curriculum structure that prescribed topics and
insisted on a specific process, she held fast to the belief that her “ideas
were more credible and important than her students might possibility explain”
(p. 7).
Poignantly Atwell confesses what many
teachers may at some level know but defend against admitting: “I had missed the
chance to understand what I was doing to talk to him and learn from him how to
help him” (p. 9). Here the teacher becomes an interventionist (Taylor, 2000, p. 48) where turning away from a prescribed curriculum she moves to a writing
workshop model that allowed students choice in what they would write and how
they would write to later refining her pedagogy further “reintegrating the
teacher to central in the writing classroom” (Taylor p. 48). Using a backwards design strategy of sorts,
Atwell is direct in her approach of being very clear in her expectations and
what students are responsible to achieve. To support her students, Atwell uses
an apprenticeship model and uses what Jerome Bruner called the “handover”
method, also known as gradual release, as the teacher intervenes and gradually
provides less support for the learner to help students learn skills and
synthesize knowledge, as they become confident writers.
It is here that I see what we can learn
from Atwell’s story of learning and the sort of pedagogies we may want to adapt
when thinking about teaching writing across the curriculum. In building our own
knowledge based and use of instructional strategies that Peterson (2008) offers
in her text for teachers, we can begin to imagine what are the possibilities
for the diversity of writers in our classrooms.
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