Last week was our first time meeting as a class to talk about writing to learn.
There was a discussion about how much writing to learn is applicable in some subject areas. For some, writing to learn is a more obvious connection in their content area than it is for others. As an example, in English and Languages other than English, writing to learn is inherently a part of the course, with writing even being a part of the standards given by
Sure, there could be more writing to learn in classes, and it would be helpful.
In class, we filled out a worksheet from Shanahan where we had to check what sort of writing was commonly used in our content area and what is not. After consulting with my fellow Science comrades, it seems that writing is commonplace in a Science classroom, but writing to communicate is far more common than writing to learn. From our class discussion, I think this has become the case in many subject areas, even those that inherently depend more on writing, like Mike mentioned in the Social Studies classes he has observed. As a student, I know I have done much more writing of analytical essays than anything that encouraged me to grow and learn.
What about students who “aren’t good writers”?
It has been mentioned by previous posters that some students are better at writing than others. However, writing to learn is designed to help yourself. Writing to communicate is designed to impart your knowledge on others. Writing to learn is reflective while writing to communicate is a way to perform. Therefore, I don’t really think it should matter what type of a writer you as far as writing to learn is concerned. Writing to learn isn’t meant to show off what a good writer you are, it is meant to reinforce and show what you know. Even if you are not a talented writer and have a hard time communicating through writing, writing to learn should be practice, and as with most things, the more that writing to learn is practiced, the better students will get at it. With any group of students, as mentioned in the Alvermann article we read a few weeks ago, there are going to be different abilities. Ideally, a student who is not a strong writer would have a chance to show their talents in other ways. However, this doesn’t mean that such a student should be exempt from, or should belittle the importance of writing, and writing to learn. In fact, introducing writing to learn by having students write about something that they are already familiar with or excel at, may be an effective way of introducing writing to learn. This is what Chandler-Olcott talks about in our reading for last week. Sometimes, it is appropriate to allow students to choose their own topic. It will help them “develop preferences as writers” and “create motivation and interest as writers”. Once students have had experience writing to learn about topics of their choice, they will be more familiar with the process and hopefully will be better able to write about topics chosen for them by others.
Is there another way?
I don’t argue that writing is a great way to provoke and produce learning. However, I do question whether or not writing is the only way for learning to occur in this sense. As previously mentioned, different students excel at different things; Alvermann talked about multiple literacies in her article. I cannot come up with anything that could replace writing to learn and I just wonder if there is something similar that could be implemented. Perhaps something that could bring those students who are "better" writers out of their comfort zone, and let different students show their abilities, while producing similar learning results.
As an aside, for my other three Science buddies in this class (or anyone who is interested, of course), I found another article by Alvermann that talks specifically about multiple literacies in Science classrooms: http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/alvermann/multilit.pdf.
Finally, I nominate Katie as sherpa for next week.
1 comment:
Post a Comment