Writing Across the Curriculum

While I can appreciate Aristotle's topois (description, narration, argument, comparison), these forms of writing are taught over and over again from 3rd or 4th grade through introductory composition in college.  They are important forms to know but there are other ways of teaching writing.  There are some great programs available, such as The National Writing Project, to help teachers prepare lessons and walk students through writing.  I also think that more emphasis should be paid to writing in different curriculums.

Collaboration
As an English teacher though, I am not knowledgeable enough about writing in all of the disciplines, and this is where collaboration can really help.  I know English and History often pair together, as does Science and Math, but there are some good reasons to pair English with Science and Math and History with Science and Math as well.  In an ideal world, this might happen.  In our current educational climate, it only happens occasionally.  When it works well, everyone is rewarded, but it can fail just as big.  I find this happens when people are forced to collaborate rather than coming to it on their own.  The logistics setting up these types of learning situations is also very tricky with different schedules and often no time to collaborate given during school.

Ideas
Comparative study is a good way for students to pick up the differences in writing among different disciplines.  It is a way to show students that writing is not confined to five paragraph essays. As an English teacher, I would ask teachers from other disciplines come in and talk about how writing for their discipline and writing for English are different.  Through this, many similarities in writing will also came out.  This was my way of inviting students into the conversation.  I think explicitly pointing out the differences is a good way to begin rather than assuming that students understand the differences.

Literature versus Writing

Reading about the development of English as a discipline by any of the authors that have tackled the subject is quite an interesting journey.  One part that is interesting is that once the department of English was finally formed, it has essentially remained the same since the turn of the 20th Century.  So, for over 100 years, the English department has looked and acted in essentially the same way.  Part of this development was taking literature as it's domain.  There professors would teach students how to interpret the words of others, as was handed down to them by their professors, and so on, and so on.

Part of this dichotomy became the literature/writing split.  Often the professors would teach the literature and the graduate students would be given the writing courses.  Again, this is something that has continued to this day.  It seems like many writing courses are relegated to the lower ranks because it is not perceived as important as literature.

This brings to my mind another question: What is the role of writing?  I often wondered this when I taught. Was writing in the service of other disciplines?  Was writing a subject to itself?  This was an especially daunting question when I taught introductory composition courses.  The purpose of the course really eluded me.  Many others feel this way too. Looking at the debate by many colleges as to whether to keep the undergraduate freshman composition courses shows that the purpose of these courses is up for debate.  Other disciplines like the course because that is where students are supposed to learn to write, thus relieving them of the obligation.  However, much research shows that writing is learned in context, through apprenticeships in a discipline, and not through these classes.  I believe some transfer skills are usable, but not all of them.  Learning to write like a literary critic is not going to help you learn to write a science lab report.

I have really come to appreciate the Writing Across the Curriculum movement that began in the 1990's.  It makes writing important in every discipline but I think it is still given second class status.  Writing can be a powerful and important way to learn information in any discipline if utilized well and often.

Old Conflicts

“So what do you do?”

“Actually, I teach English.”

(False heartiness) “I guess I better watch how I talk.”

From a listener, with an edge of resentment: “I could never figure out why we always had to look for hidden meanings in English.” ( from Peter Elbow's What is English? (1990) New York, NY: The Modern Language Association of America, p. 111)

Elbow presents this fictional vignette to illustrate the defensiveness on the part of students and teachers regarding the subject of English.  The first and third speakers surmise that the only purposes of English teachers are to be guardians of grammar and mysterious literary interpretations.  This was written twenty years ago but I bet that it still rings true with many English teachers today, not just me.

Essays returned to students bleeding with cryptic annotations such as c.s., awk, frag, shift, and missing or misused punctuation marks clearly illustrate that English teachers are the centurions of language usage.  Similarly, the revelation in literature like that rusty bicycle pump in James Joyce’s “Araby” symbolizing the corruption and deterioration of the Catholic Church in Ireland at the turn of the 20^th Century solidifies the English teacher’s mystical powers over literature.

These less than enjoyable experiences follow students well beyond their school days. The second speaker begins the sentence with a defensive “actually” to counteract the impending disbelief and inevitable backlash normally associated with the revelation of career choice. The fact that teaching English was a deliberate choice rather than the repercussion of an inability to be a journalist or any other profession associated with English may come as a surprise to some people.

Elbow goes on to ask why people feel “downright fear or anger…about their English classes?  After all, most people found math harder than English and Chemistry more boring” (p. 111).  He goes on to answer this question by explaining that grammar and literature are “agents of gentility and good taste” (p. 111) which are then used as “mechanisms for discrimination” (p. 111).  

I bring this up because I think as English teachers we sometimes suffer from these stereotypes that have been around for a very long time.  Of course, we all know teachers that fit the stereotype, and then there are those that try to break out of it.  The point is that many of the problem that we might see in English, or problems that we feel as teachers trying to teach this material, is that these conflicts have been around a very long time.

This week, I will be focusing a bit more on these conflicts.  I was not aware of them until I started researching them but I could feel them when I taught and when I tried to decide on curriculum choices for my students.  I could feel them talking with other teachers in different disciplines and with other teachers at different levels.  Being aware that these conflicts merely existed was enough to help me better understand my own thoughts and ideas about teaching writing.