Andrea Palmer
Lit. Review
CRWP
July 3, 2010
Reviewing Across Resources
Is this a small shirt size topic? Or an X-large shirt topic? As I began to research writing across the curriculum, I found that some resources gave snappy exercises to bring literacy into math, science, art, and engineering. Others focused on how to use portfolios or technology across the curriculum. Some resources did not even mention it, but were still useful for information on writing that could be applied across the curriculum. When I got to narrowing down the sources that fit the best, I decided on this diverse bunch because they reflect the complexity of this issue.
Why should students write in every subject area? Ron Smelser address this issue in How to Build Better Engineers: A Practical Approach to the Mechanics of Text. He has found a problem with his college-level engineering students: they do not know how to write well enough within the forms necessary for the workplace. Over the course of a semester, he found that assigning students workplace style writing such as memos, reports, proposals, and technical assessments of equipment vastly improved their abilities to communicate with colleagues. Giving students an authentic task like this gives students more motivation to complete it well. They can see the usefulness for their future, so they want to learn how it is done well. It matches up with students’ literacy goals and with their future employers’ literacy requirements. While students in this program were not given a choice of how to present their information, the practice was necessary for their future success. Authentic tasks like this could be incorporated into a variety of subject areas to help students learn the professional language of that subject. Other tasks that bring students to higher level thinking also help develop knowledge about a subject area.
In How Enzymes Act : Skit Writing in Science Class, John Dorroh describes how using creative writing has helped his students deepen their understanding of science. He found that before having students write skits from the point of view of an enzyme, the students memorized information, but since he started incorporating writing into his classroom with this inquiry-based approach, students have begun to learn and retain information. This shows that writing can enhance a student’s learning across the curriculum. Thinking creatively helps students not only in their writing, but in their interpretations and understanding of content topics. This same activity could be used in any subject area class to show students what they are learning instead of telling them about it.Dorroh now uses these skits as “documentation that students are operating at a very high level of thinking” in student portfolios (p. 17), which is what we as teachers strive for in every subject area.
Stan Pesick provides more information on including portfolios across the curriculum in his article Writing History: Before and After Porfolios. One year he decided that his students were not being pushed to higher level thinking. Their answers to questions about history were concise and factual. He wanted to push them to be analytical. By using a multi-genre portfolio, he was able to motivate students to dig deeper into history. Students knew that their initial piece of writing would have to be revised to find a place in their portfolios, so they worked much more carefully on their finished pieces. Pieces that they included required students to reflect, synthesize, analyze, connect and respond as a historian. Pushing students to this higher level of thinking in their daily work drove them to better responses on short answer assessments at the end of the semester. While there is a lot of skepticism among teachers about using portfolios because they could take time away from content learning, the learning done by these students made the time worth it. Students were more engaged in their learning and discovered history in a new way. The multi-genre aspect of the project was useful to exposing students to a variety of ways to present information and pushing them into mediums that they may not have been comfortable with initially, but the choice aspect was only in deciding which pieces to include in the final portfolio. The mode, medium, and audience had already been set for them. They were asked to respond within those confines, then decide on their best work. This does give a teacher control over the kinds of work that the students are doing, but can take some motivation away.
Silent Voices: How Language Minority Students Learn in Content Areas by Beth Winningham describes more aspects of what motivates students to learn across the curriculum. She asserts that ESL students want to be involved in learning and need practice in using language in every area. It pushes them to make connections between their previous experiences and the content. Writing is a vital part of this. Allowing students to respond in a variety of genres and with a range of literacy skills builds their language skills as well as their content knowledge. Another major influence on this was collaboration and having the teacher as a facilitator. In this kind of environment, ESL students were able to get the individual help and feedback that they needed from peers and their teacher. Especially in schools were there is not an ESL program like mine, teachers need to help students succeed by bringing in methods that work like collaborative writing and reflections on learning. For our students who struggle the most, this kind of classroom environment is the most effective.
Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them supports this kind of classroom environment in which students can work on literacy skills with the teacher available as a facilitator. Writer’s workshop is a system that sets students up to write a lot and rework their pieces so that they can present their best ideas. Students can work collaboratively on projects or when they need feedback on their pieces. Doing this kind of consistent writing in every class helps students to focus their thoughts and connect the material to their own lives. Even though Kittle’s model allows for a lot of student choice in topic, it could be adapted to fit into any subject area, especially through the use of writing prompts. Through this, students could discover topics within the content that they are interested in researching or question that they want to work through. Writer’s workshop sets up an inquiry-based classroom quite well.
Each of these sources provides a slant on writing across the curriculum that represents the complexity of the subject, but still supports some best practices. Each one uses an inquiry approach to teaching. Students work collaboratively, and they write to learn quite often. In these successful classrooms, teachers have learned how to bring writing into every content area.