Personal Learning Outcomes from Teaching of Composition and Literature

Personal Learning Outcomes from ENGLC0862: Teaching Composition and Literature

     I’ve always had good ideas for classroom practice and after class work, but this class gave me the necessary background information to implement much more effective techniques.  Although many of the texts we read this semester were influential, there were a few that were particularly interesting to me.  This paper is an examination of how, I believe, those specific texts will influence my teaching into the future.

     The first I’d like to mention is Min-Zhan Lu’s “From Silence into Words: Writing as Struggle”.  This essay really layered complexity onto issues of how language is expressive of more than just what gets put down on a page.  Choosing to use specific words or dialects can be a choice, on the part of the writer, to align or distance him/herself from his/her own cultural social, political or racial group.  I don’t think I realized, prior to reading Lu’s essay, the idea that what I may perceive as a lack of proficiency with regard to utilizing Standard American English in a student’s writing could actually be a stylistic choice they are making to convey a deeper meaning.  This new understanding could help me help students to refine that stylistic choice so that their audience understands it as choice which will allow the reader greater access to the writer’s meaning.  I could also introduce the option of code-mixing in a single piece of writing such that the audience grasps the writer’s proficiency in both English language variants.  If the writer can successfully code-mix, readers will hold the writer in higher regard and be more willing to accept non-standard language as a choice made for a specific purpose.

     The second text I’d like to address is “Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course” by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky.  I’ve never encountered such an extensive published curriculum.  This is an excellent resource that can be implemented as a whole or in part in the basic writing classroom.  The activities are heavily scaffolded which, in my experience, is a very good technique to improve overall production and accuracy in writing.  What interested me most was that many of the exercises had a time limit instead of a specified required length.  I’d love to enact that technique in my own classroom.  I’m not exactly sure what the effect would be but it seems like might be a good way to manage student anxiety about production.  I feel that whenever anxiety can be diminished, production will increase and, in many of my classes, a central theme is increased production.  I also agree with the authors that journals that aren’t graded or corrected are an excellent way to provide lo stakes writing opportunities.  There’s also a heavy emphasis on revision, peer review and discussion.  I was a bit surprised by the extensive nature of the reading but that could be modified for classes that have lower, or higher, reading comprehension.

     Finally, I’d like to mention the techniques documented in Christopher Weaver’s “Grading in a Process-Based Writing Classroom” and Frances Zak’s "Exclusively Positive Response to Student Writing".  I’ve always understood that overcorrection or inappropriate correction of student writing can be detrimental to a student’s progress; however, I haven’t always known how to address the problem.  These readings gave me some very good ideas about how to proceed in the future.  I really liked Weaver’s idea about restricting prescriptive corrections to particular formalized assignments rather than correcting all writing for both low and high order concerns. Zak’s article was also enlightening although I think that there would need to be further evidence gathered in order to really prove up her technique of only giving positive response to basic writers.  My own idea is to combine Weaver and Zak’s techniques to give exclusively positive response to drafts, free writing, journals and other writing that is assigned to increase production and reserve more prescriptive corrections for final drafts and assignments that need to have a grade affixed to them.

     Generally speaking, the content of the course gave me a different perspective about the problems that writers face and armed me with new techniques for effectively addressing those issues. I also picked up some very good lesson planning materials for reference in my own classes.