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Articles Conference Reviews |
A.39 English Journal as a BridgeA.39 English Journal as a Bridge between College and High School Writing Teachers Chair: Ken Lindblom, Stony Brook U, NY Speakers:
Sara Hillin opened the session by describing how and why articles from English Journal (EJ) are required reading in her teacher education course—The Teaching of Writing—for aspiring high school teachers. Hillin sought out EJ having found herself teaching a kind of course she’d never taken for students who would teach at a level she’d never taught. As “I scrambled to find good resources for my students,” she explained, “I stumbled onto English Journal.” Hillin values EJ for its emphasis on pedagogical practice, a focus her preservice- and student-teachers value. Hillin highlighted some of the “benefits” of EJ as a teaching tool, among them a focus on classroom issues, model lessons, and instructional practices such as lesson planning and troubleshooting. Hillin noted that, perhaps because the journal emphasizes practice over theory, “a lot of intuition and seasoned teaching” as well as “creativity” inform the articles, all of which she encourages her students to “borrow” and learn from. Hillin especially values the reflections on practice that she has found in EJ articles by practicing K-12 teachers. Hillin distributed a three-page handout that included an overview of her course, a sample major assignment called an “Inquiry Project,” and a short list of EJ titles covering “every major topic [she] cover[s],” several of which she has “come back to over and over again.” Hillin’s students, she noted, consult these and other EJ articles as they develop lesson plan assignments, modeled on the Read/Write/Think examples on the NCTE website, as they confront such everyday challenges as lesson length and timing, resources and equipment needed, possible contingencies—including student resistance to a particular lesson or to learning more in general—as well as such fundamentals as lesson objectives and rationales. Hillin offered an illustration of one student’s Inquiry Project, which focused on “Teaching Critical Thinking Skills Associated with Argumentation and Persuasion,” a topic that she noted EJ devoted an entire issue to in July 2010. Hillin claims not to require that her students use EJ articles exclusively, yet many of them, she claimed, “gravitate toward the journal for at least one of their annotations” for their selected annotated bibliography for this project. More importantly, perhaps, Hillin’s use of EJ as a resource for future teachers introduces them to the informed, reflective practice of teachers in “real” classrooms—in effect helping to demystify the practice of teaching for her students while perhaps cultivating an appreciation for pedagogical innovation and reflection that will inspire their own. The second speaker was Ken Lindblom, editor of EJ, who issued a broad call for submissions to EJ, especially submissions that represent “cross-level collaborations.” Lindblom provided a preview of future issues, starting with the “NCTE Centennial Issue: Reading the Past, Writing the Future,” commissioned by Guest Editor Leila Christenbury, to be published in September 2011. Themes of future issues include “Students Reading and Writing for Their Own Purposes” (November 2011) and “The Community in the Classroom” (July 2012). Lindblom’s purpose was primarily to describe the kinds of articles EJ seeks to publish and his desire to promote collaborations between K-12 and college-level literacy educators in manuscripts that privilege practice over theory, though he conceded a theoretical foundation is valuable. Lindblom suggested that submissions also include samples of student writing, classroom handouts, and assignments, as well as a Works Cited list of the “best stuff” consulted. He closed by summarizing the benefits of publishing in EJ, including the quick turnaround of submissions and privilege of communicating with the “entire composition community.” He noted that the ten-percent acceptance rate and double-blind reading of manuscripts would garner respect in reviews for tenure and promotion as well. The next speaker was Missy Leveen Phegley, who described a multi-faceted, cross-level collaboration she conducted between her graduate student teaching assistants and students in high school classrooms for whom her own students served as writing coaches. Phegley described the project’s technological evolution from email to Blackboard Discussion Forums to Skype. Throughout the project, two grad students served as writing consultants for one high school writer. This “double-teaming” was to ensure that the student writers would begin to develop ownership of their writing as they negotiated the different interests and comments of their reader-coaches. Phegley described the first “phase” of the project as “grossly inefficient” because of the time lag and distractions that characterize email exchanges. In “phase two,” in which her preservice teachers commented on drafts composed by high school students (9-12), the use of Blackboard Discussion Forums enabled more focused and precise exchanges about specific questions and problems. Student-writers posted drafts as “threads”; student-teachers posted comments as “replies.” Responses were, of course, textual, which meant that student writers could return to them for guidance as they revised. In phase three, writer-tutor exchanges on Skype were pre-scheduled, vocal rather than written, and thus synchronous rather than asynchronous. While the evolution from phase to phase might appear progressive, Phegley’s students discovered technological limitations in each modality. For example, conferences conducted on Skype were often glitchy and stilted, yet they have yielded a rich video archive for training future tutors. Other logistical problems plagued both the email and Blackboard interactions at different times along the way. In at least one case, though, Skype helped student writers to understand better the terse and, it seemed, caustic comments of one of the grad student tutors. As Phegley noted, once they saw the tutor on video, they became more comfortable with his delivery. This contrast in reception of a tutor’s written and spoken voices was an important insight for tutors and writers alike. The most striking benefit of the cross-collaboration—no matter the platform—was that, because the high school student-writers were “no longer just writing for the teacher,” they began to appreciate their authority as writers of their own texts and began to respond to critiques with awareness of “writing for a broader audience.” They began learning how to ask questions of their readers and became more critical of responses to their own writing, no longer looking to their tutors for quick fixes. One important benefit for graduate students involved in the project was the opportunity to test the limits of theoretical frameworks they study when applied to actual students’ work. Elizabeth Brockman gave the final presentation, describing a six-year assessment project that began in response to negative “teacher talk” about student-writing campus wide. Brockman explained that through focus groups and other assessment strategies, she and her colleagues were able to secure funding to develop a WAC/WID initiative and institute changes in their FYC program. While reporting in EJ the results of the assessment project and what became a Quality Enhancement Plan (or QEP) on her campus would be of value to high school teachers, Brockman acknowledged that sharing the critical “teacher talk” from focus groups without offending pre-college-level teachers was a challenge. But it is a challenge we need to embrace, she suggested, because the trials and tribulations of college-level writers are of interest and relevance to EJ readers. The session closed Lil Brannon’s response, which began rather disparagingly in view of the recent elimination of federal funding for the National Writing Project (a fact that was given a very different treatment in session F.05), which Brannon described as “the only collaborative program” with national stature. Brannon focused concern on the need for college and K-12 literacy educators to forge an “alliance” of “voices in opposition” to proposed state and federal educational reforms. Brannon lamented the loss of both Democratic and Republican support for education as an issue, pointing to the emphasis on testing and accountability as evidence of the corporatization of education and the exclusion of professional educators from the process of planning and instituting reform. At this Thursday morning session, Brannon speculated, “Very few college level teachers even know what is going on.” Sessions throughout the rest of the conference would remedy that. |