Student Ownership of Writing

On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response

By Brannon and Knoblauch

This article begins by making the connection between professional and student writers, claiming that “The incentive to write derives from an assumption that people will listen respectfully and either assent to or earnestly consider the ideas expressed” (158). The authors claim that people will stay with a more intricate text, deciding that the text is difficult for them and become frustrated with the writer. The text claims that this “connection between a writer’s authority and quality of a reader’s attention is altered because of the peculiar relationship between teacher and student” (158). As a teacher of writing, I immediately got my guard up. I was weary of what direction this article was going to take.

The article continues to discuss how teachers are too quick to “correct” the ideas of a student and are less concerned with what the writer was trying to say. The article believes that the writing becomes more about the reader then and less about the writer’s message. I agree and disagree with this idea. I agree with this idea because we want our writers to see that the teacher isn’t their sole audience. We want them to think about the bigger picture and decide on their own who they are speaking to and what message they want to get across. I also agree with the idea that teachers tend to revise or correct papers to fit their ideas and care less about the students’. Sometimes we can attempt to force our students into a confined space where they need to produce what we expect. It is a fine line between completing an assignment and expressing ideas. This idea may work for college students, but my sixth graders are not capable of viewing their audience as anyone other than their teacher. In order to think in the bigger picture, you must learn the structure first.  It also brought into question the idea of grading. We live in a world where we have to grade students on their work and justify our grades to their ever demanding parents; therefore, we have a curriculum to follow. How do we assess students if it is all about what they want to produce? There has to be a compromise.

After reading some of my colleagues blogs, I was pleased to see that I had the same reaction as Sara. I was a bit offended by the articles assumption that we do not give student options. As a Language Arts teacher, we are encouraged, and evaluated on, our availability of student choice in our classroom. Students may have to produce the same type of content, but they are given options on what they want to produce and how they want to get there. My job is to coach them within the realm of the assignment, but to encourage them to find creative ways to do so.

Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

By Richard Fulkerson

Fulkerson’s article was a bit difficult for me to read. I found that I was getting lost in the translation of vocabulary and had to constantly reread sections of the text to create meaning. I found that this article pertained to college composition, which was maybe one reason I struggled to relate. I appreciate the theoretical lens Fulkerson used to express the shift in composition studies into different disciplines; however, I felt that it was drawn out and over explained. The article poses interesting questions about what is good writing and why are we teaching it? The article discusses how there is a different answer to these questions depending on your profession: teacher, dean, parent, and ultimately it’s the students who suffer from our lack of a coherent answer.

I did enjoy when Fulkerson discussed the Critical/Cultural Studies discipline being about liberation for a writer to develop tools to help them challenge cultural inequalities and to question their role in society. As a Language Arts teacher, I strive to expose my students to texts and variety of ideas that help them question the world we live in. However, this raised the idea of working across disciplines, with the social studies and science teachers, to expose our students to writing to make sense of the world in other classes as well. The article brings up this point and states that this work and this writing does not need to occur in solely the English Department, but history and sociology departments as well. I believe it is important for students to view writing as something they do outside of an English course, which most do not. Upon talking to my friend about his experience with writing in college, outside of his freshman English class, he took one other writing course, in technical writing for engineering majors, which he found beyond practical for his career. I think it is important for students of all ages to see writing through different lenses and through different disciplines, but all are important.