My philosophy on teaching writing has been cultivated by my experience working as a Course Embedded Consultant (CEC) for the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity at Eastern Kentucky University and a Writing Consultant at the Robert E. Hemenway Writing Center at the University of Kentucky. I worked as a teaching assistant for a class of first-year, developmental writers and had the unique opportunity to act as a designated collaborator for those students. I worked with many students who were insightful thinkers that constructed strong arguments and who believed they were “bad writers” because they were not masters of Standard American English. This lack of confidence can put up a wall in a student’s mind, and they think they need to get over the obstacle of grammar before they can start writing.
As a writing instructor who will encounter first-year writers, it is my responsibility to decouple the ideas of standard language mastery and writing mastery, and to destroy the idea that there is a “correct” way to write. Doing this involves stressing the importance of other aspects of writing and de-stressing grammar. This effort also includes emphasizing Students’ Rights to Their Own Language, and that I will not be punishing them for speaking in the way that is comfortable to them, both in the classroom and in their writing, and that they, as peers and collaborators in the writing process, should do the same. This is especially important when working with ESL students whose writing, even when written in perfect Standard English, may follow some of the syntax and rhetorical style of their home language, and it is my job to distinguish between what is a mistake and what is simply unfamiliar to me as a speaker of American English. At the Noel Studio, I would sometimes work with students whose professor had marked a passage as grammatically incorrect, even though it was just non-standard phrasing in English.
My responsibility as a teacher in terms of allowing students to use their own language to demonstrate their learning is that I must also meet them where they are. What I mean by this, is that I cannot give them the freedom to turn in work that was written descriptively and yet still teach from a place of prescriptivism. I have known professors to teach with the philosophy that they will teach at a higher “level” in terms of vocabulary and concepts and materials used, and the students must work to reach that level in order to understand the lesson. (I use “level” here only because that is the word used to describe this philosophy by the professors who hold it, although I don’t believe in the idea that there is a hierarchy of intellectualism when it comes to how writing is taught.) Instead of focusing “bringing students to a certain level” before teaching concepts, I believe in teaching these concepts using materials that students are already familiar with, and working with them within the realm of their understanding. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is all well and good for demonstrating a rhetorical concept, but if you are spending more time acquainting students with the unfamiliar text that they will likely never encounter again than teaching the concept that the text demonstrates, maybe it’s not the best text for that class. My experience working with students one-on-one is that they often come to understanding about writing and rhetoric when introduced through texts that they encounter on a daily basis, such as social media posts, advertisements, newsreels, blog posts, clickbait headlines, all texts that they will actually interact with rhetorically in their lives.
Peer Review offers one of the best ways to introduce collaboration in the classroom. If students are taught the best practices of peer review, it will not only help them to be better collaborators, but will help them with their own writing. As a CEC, I would work based on a system of higher-order to lower-order concerns, recognizing that I had limited time with students, and that discussing sentence structure was useless if entire paragraphs needed re-written. This is a system that I will emphasize when doing Peer Review, as most students will be inclined to mark lower-order concerns like grammar if they aren’t taught the hierarchy.
The CEC program was founded on the principle that students learn writing better if they are given someone to collaborate with at every step of the process. At the Noel Studio, the most productive consultations were spent brainstorming or drafting, as many students struggled more with those steps than revision. Group brainstorming can benefit students who need to talk their ideas out with someone, and can lead to an exchange of ideas among peers which can be used to teach valuable skills in terms of research and citation, which can be built upon later when discussing how students should collaborate with scholarly texts. Building an environment in which sharing and discussing each other’s work early in the writing process creates a sense of trust, so when it comes time for Peer Review, students are less hesitant to share their writing with others and more willing to receive that feedback.
Building a writing classroom based on student collaboration requires establishing the expectations of respect for differences in language, and teaching the hierarchy of concerns. My experience as a writing center consultant both at EKU and at the University of Kentucky, has allowed me to work with students individually and learn how collaboration can be utilized beneficially.
