In the first draft, many students wrote about literacy experiences that happen outside of school, or, more properly speaking, that happen before schooling begins. They wrote about reading with their moms and dads, writing stories for their grandmothers, playing school, trying to imitate their older siblings’ reading and writing habits, taking trips to the public library, that sort of thing. This isn’t surprising to me. These experiences go a long way towards explaining how and why these students wound up pursuing the teaching of English as a career. However, I am struck by the frequency of outside the classroom experiences mentioned in the second drafts. It seems that many students are having their most important and influential experiences with reading and writing outside of the classroom.
One student wrote about a teacher who had sponsored and advised a school club for creative writing. The principal objected to the club because few of the students in it were doing well in their English classes. He believed that students should only be allowed to participate in such a club if they got their grades up in their regular English classes. Spending time doing creative writing was simply distracting them from concentrating on their regular studies. So he disbanded the club. The teacher agreed to meet with the students informally and outside of school to help mentor their creative writing. The so-called club ceased having any affiliation with the school, and only met off campus and after school hours.
Another student wrote about a relationship she developed with one of her English teachers, whose class she really liked. She began hanging out in the teacher’s classroom at the end of each day for the thirty or so minutes before sports practices began. They talked about books and writing. Eventually the teacher shared with her that she wrote and published poetry and stories, and was working on a novel. Soon, the teacher and the student were spending their brief time together every afternoon sharing their writing. The student was very impressed with her teacher’s poetry and the excerpts she heard from her novel, and enjoyed the feedback she got from the teacher on her own writing. Thinking back on this experience now that she is going into teaching, the student made the observation that the teacher could have brought her writing into the classroom and created this sort of experience for all the students. However, the teacher apparently felt at a loss for how to fit poetry and fiction writing into the very prescriptive American Literature curriculum, and was uncomfortable sharing her personal writing with students, or having students share with her and one another their own personal writing. As it was, it had taken a large part of the semester to feel comfortable sharing with this one student she had developed a trusting relationship with, and even then she worried that her administrators might disapprove of this out of class writing and sharing relationship for being unprofessional or inappropriate.
When I think back on my education, I would have to say that some of my most influential experiences took place outside the four walls of the classroom, too. I took Saturday morning enrichment classes throughout elementary school, and some of the things I loved about those were the loose structure, the lack of assessment, and the opportunity to work with older students. Years later, in Catholic high school, I worked with the campus ministry running peer counseling sessions and visiting soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and hospices; and I worked for the school newspaper writing and editing mostly sports articles. Again, I loved how much more free those organizations were. We never sat at desks in rows and never took tests. Long periods of time might pass when I or some small group worked on something totally out of sight of the advisor. I couldn’t even have told you where he or she was.
In the early years of my teaching career I advised a high school newspaper and literary magazine, and much the same culture existed—loose structure, lots of freedom and autonomy for the students, deadlines and rigor but not tests or grades. One year I had a group of kids that somehow or other got into the habit of calling me by my first name, but only after school during the meetings for the magazine and newspaper, never during the day in the classroom or the halls or in front of other teachers or students.
My wife and I have had similar experiences traveling abroad with students. The supervision of their whereabouts cannot be as rigid as it typically is in school. Interactions tend to be much more personal in nature. The days are filled with rich and valuable experiences, but there are no tests. No one is going to grade the quality of anyone’s participation in a travel- or study-abroad experience. And yet the kids, of their own accord, will write and blog about what they do each day, take photos, make videos, all sorts of things that they are inspired to do by the nature of their experiences, not because anyone required it.
What does all this say about traditional instruction and classroom structure? I think the challenge for us becomes how to make our students’ experiences inside the classroom more like these experiences outside the classroom.
No comments:
Post a Comment