Why teachers should also write.

Abstract

Teachers are not simply transmitters of disciplinary information but veterans initiating outsiders into disciplinary ideas and ways of thinking and communicating. After examining two alternative approaches to a constructivist model of instruction, this paper argues that teachers in all disciplines can act as insiders in helping students to write more effectively within academic contexts. Teachers who write are even more effective in this instructional role because they actively reflect on their writing experiences and processes. Teachers who write bring expert knowledge (of content and language) from tacit to conscious awareness and thus more effectively engage both insider (teacher) and outsider (student) in the teaching exchange.

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In recent work on the effectiveness of writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC), Hilgers et al. (1999) found that over 90% of their student interviewees believe that "writing about something leads to learning." Almost 50% believe that "writing is the best way for them to learn." Unfortunately, traditional attitudes among teachers in some disciplines, even among teachers involved in WAC, posit that writing "leads to learning" only for students. Why do teachers see writing as an important learning tool for students but not for themselves?

Part of the problem arises from accepted notions of expertise. The WAC instructors I work with, for instance, think of themselves as experts in nutrition, history, psychology, pathology, philosophy, and economics. Another part of the problem comes from thinking about writing as an endeavor separate from the research and teaching these faculty members take for granted. We need to challenge these notions to explore an instructional model that characterizes teachers not so much as transmitters of disciplinary information but as veterans initiating outsiders into disciplinary ideas and ways of thinking and communicating. Let me present two approaches to such a model before I take up what the model implies about teacher roles and rewards.

One approach to a model of instruction

Think about the ways you've learned new skills as an adult. For instance, I'm learning to do some rudimentary home carpentry. My mentor tells me the names of tools and gives advice. Then he shows me how to do certain parts of the process. After I watch once or twice, I start to practice with him watching and guiding my hands or giving more advice as he talks me through the process. Finally, he walks away to let me work on my own until I run into a situation we haven't talked about. I'll ask for help and he'll respond by asking what I think will work. Before I make a costly mistake, he'll step in, but he mainly lets me learn from minor mistakes and from the small successes that accumulate as we go through this process. Could my mentor install a chair rail in 20% of the time it takes me? Sure, but after we go through this process we both know what he's learned through his long experience and what I could now pass along to others who want to learn these carpentry skills from me.

As I write out this process of guided practice or apprenticeship, I'm reminded of other situations in which I learned to sew, cook, bake bread, crochet, even ice skate. For me, learning all these skills started when I worked closely with a knowledgeable "insider" who explained the process, positioned my body, answered questions, and stood ready to intervene as I moved from initial tentative steps into new territory with my new understanding and growing skill.

Writing, like the skills noted above, has a physical component, but most of our students don't need guidance about how to hold a pen and form letters, and most would be appalled to have someone position their bodies in front of a keyboard as my typing teacher did over 30 years ago. Rather, what our writing students need falls more into the category of cognitive apprenticeship for advanced thinking (Brown et al., 1989; Collins, et al., 1989). In addition to the physical skills required of the ice skater, cognitive skills draw much more on habits of mind than body. Writers need to draw on what they already know about the language to craft both grammatical sentences and coherent, genre-appropriate texts. Writers need to draw on what they know about communication more generally to fill in how rhetorical context shapes their writing. Writers need to know how to draw on their past experiences that might be appropriate as content for their texts as well as any reading they could use as source material. Juggling all these cognitive constraints makes writing every bit as cognitively demanding as performing an axle on ice skates is physically demanding.

An alternative approach to a model of instruction

Many literacy theorists, however, would argue that writing doesn't fit smoothly into the model of cognitive apprenticeship because, unlike the problem-solving model that applies to other disciplines accepted in the cognitive apprenticeship model, writing isn't guided by a search for the right answer or for the best resource-management solution. Instead, writing falls much more into the realm of human interaction and communication, and problem-solving is not a particularly good model for understanding language processes. Rather, other theoretical perspectives on language point toward normalized and marginalized discourse as more appropriate explanations of how and why we use language. (See, for instance, Bazerman, 1985; Bazerman, 1990; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; LeCourt, 1996; Blakeslee, 1997; Russell, 1997; Egan-Robertson, 1998; Gallas, 2001; Greene, 2001; for different theoretical perspectives on learning as socially or culturally constituted.) Although theorists disagree about the underlying principles that govern language use--power, gender, identity--many do agree that cultural context plays a far more important role than individual cognition. For example, a conversation among friends around a dinner table typically drifts from topic to topic over time, but no one person can jump into an animated conversation with a brilliant but unrelated insight and expect others at the table to view the insight as anything other than a disruption. No matter how stunning the individual insight, cultural convention demands turn-taking; changing topics abruptly violates this cultural principle.

We learn the cultural conventions through acculturation, a process by which we discover through observation, trial-and-error, and even punishment where the center and margins of the culture are. (Think about the child whose interruptions at the dinner table lead to being taken away from the table. Only when the child can "behave" by not interrupting does she return to sit with the adults.) Adults who push the margins or boundaries may be hailed as visionaries or madmen, but we assume that children and adolescents just don't know the conventions yet. Disruptive comments from children are typically ignored, not brought into the center of the conversation. However, as children "mature," they become acculturated and adopt conventional behavior. Eventually, conventional behavior, now completely normalized, becomes the unquestioned standard, and "insiders" see the differences between the avant-garde and the insane. Under this approach, writing skills develop as students move from basic understandings of sentences and paragraphs into more sophisticated uses of discipline specific jargon and formats through sustained interaction with an insider who can reinforce conventional usages and discourage unconventional or disruptive communication.

Building a learning environment from the approaches

Clearly, both approaches I've described above favor collaborative and constructive principles. Moreover, I've used "insider" when talking about both approaches for a reason. Although the traditional model of apprentice/journeyman/master would undoubtedly identify the skilled guide as an expert, I prefer to use "insider" to tie the two theoretical approaches more closely together. An insider might not be consciously aware of what he or she knows. For instance, when I ask my mentor why he makes certain moves as a carpenter, he often has to stop and puzzle out the reason because acting in a certain way has become so ingrained as to need no conscious justification. Similarly, how many of the friends and family that I had dinner with last Christmas could consciously articulate the conventions of conversational turn-taking?

But "insider" is a better term than expert for a much more powerful reason. Although few of us claim to be expert writers, all of us who have experience as readers and writers in academic contexts become increasingly comfortable as insiders the longer we use that academic discourse. Consider, for example, the parallel discourse of "fan fics." Fans who watch a particular television show or read other pop-culture fictions create their own fictions about established characters. Some of the electronic bulletin boards that host these fan tics have editorial boards that review submissions and post the "best" ones, according to criteria the board agrees on. Other bulletin boards allow all the participants to review each other's postings and comment about how successful the "fics" are. When writers violate the unarticulated conventions of the fan fic insiders, their postings can be thoroughly trashed by other posters. And even though most of the postings are anonymous, fan fic readers and writers will avoid reading the work of someone with a signature characteristic in their fan fics. In short, insiders who "know" the conventions of normalized discourse or insiders who "know" how to write fan tics can powerfully shape the work of any newcomers to the context by telling them how to write more successfully or even by punishing those who violate conventions too radically.

My point is that English teachers are not the only ones who can act as insiders in helping students to write more effectively within academic contexts. Everyone who knows how to read can bring that knowledge of language to a useful exchange with a writer looking for reactions to the effectiveness of a text. And teachers across the curriculum who participate in WAC programs know far more than simply how to read: they know the discipline itself from the inside as well as the disciplinary conventions for talking about its work--what kinds of evidence are most commonly accepted, how citations of authorities are incorporated into texts, how texts can look, i.e., the balance of text and graphical information, the typical length of paragraphs, the use of standard sections and headings, and so on.

If WAC teachers are already insiders who can work with students not only on disciplinary content and on discipline-specific writing skills, then why do they need to think of themselves as writers? To answer this question, we need to turn to a particular use of writing for reflective practice.

What teachers as writers gain from writing

In The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Donald Schon notes that

   When we go about the spontaneous, intuitive performance of the
   actions of everyday life, we show ourselves to be knowledgeable in
   a special way. Often we cannot say what it is that we know. When
   we try to describe it we find ourselves at a loss, or we produce
   descriptions that are obviously inappropriate. Our knowing is
   ordinarily tacit, implicit in our patterns of action and in our
   feel for the stuff with which we are dealing. (49)

Schon goes on to explain that we can challenge our tacit knowledge by reflecting on the both the situations in which we perform and the know-how we use to perform. In particular, reflection can be triggered by surprise, that is, by a situation or an experience that jars us into realizing that we are acting in usual or scripted ways. He argues that "a practitioner's reflection can ... surface and criticize the tacit understandings that have grown up around the repetitive experiences of a specialized practice" (61). Clearly, the relatively routine act of teaching disciplinary knowledge can lead to that teaching becoming a practice capturing multiple layers of tacit knowledge. When teachers in all disciplines challenge their thinking by actively reflecting on that thinking and knowledge, they bring to the surface not only what they know but how they know it. In effect, reflective writing can help teachers understand why students might not interpret lecture material as clearly as the teacher believes they should be able to or why a particular assignment failed in its goal.

And when teachers move beyond reflective writing focused on their tacit disciplinary knowledge or their teaching practices into writing for audiences other than the self, then they are much more likely, I believe, to begin challenging other conventional or tacit knowledge about writing itself. Teachers engaged in writing--even writing not destined for publication--will become much more aware of their own writing processes and strategies so that they can model these for students (or at least be able to help students see alternatives to their own preferred and tacit processes and strategies). Writing itself can become the jarring or surprising experience that breaks teachers out of routine thinking about the disciplinary content and students' grasp of it.

In the collaborative learning environment I outlined above, writing can be an instructional tool for both the expert and novice, insider and initiate. Certainly students learn disciplinary knowledge when they research a topic and write about that new knowledge in an academic setting. They also learn from feedback that each discipline values certain kinds of evidence structured in conventional ways. But teachers who write also learn (or re-learn, if you will) about their tacit knowledge of disciplinary principles, data, and processes. More important, when they write, they learn or reexamine tacit knowledge about disciplinary conventions for shaping discourse. Schon argues that reflective professionals become better teachers, more able participants in the collaborative learning environments of our classrooms. I believe we can go further: all writing--reflective and outward-directed--brings expert knowledge (of content and language) from tacit to conscious awareness and thus leads to more effective engagement by both insider and outsider in the teaching exchange.

References

Bazerman, C. (1985). Physicists reading physics: Schema-laden purposes and purpose-laden schema. Written Communication, 2(1), 3-24.

Bazerman, C. (1990). Discourse analysis and social construction. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 11, 77-83.

Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T.N. (1995). Rethinking genre from a sociocognitive perspective. In C. Berkenkotter and T. N. Huckin (Eds.), Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power, pp. 1-25. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Blakeslee, A.M. (1997). Activity, context, interaction, and authority: Learning to write scientific papers in situ. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 11(2), 126-168.

Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42.

Collins, A., Brown, J.S., & Newman, S.E. (1989). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the crafts of reading, writing, and mathematics. In L.B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, Learning, and Instruction: Essays in Honor of Robert Glaser, pp. 453-494. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Egan-Robertson, A. (1998). Learning about culture, language, and power: Understanding relationships among personhood, literacy practices, and intertextuality. Journal of Literacy Research 30(4), 449-487.

Gallas, K. (2001). "Look, Karen, I'm running like jell-o:" Imagination as a question, a topic, a tool for literacy research and learning. Research in the Teaching of English, 35(4), 457-92.

Greene, S. (2001). The question of authenticity: Teaching writing in a first-year college history of science class. Research in the Teaching of English, 35(4), 525-69.

Hilgers, T.L., Hussey, E.L., & Stitt-Bergh, M. (1999). "'As you're writing, you have these epiphanies': What college students say about writing and learning in their majors." Written Communication, 16(3), 317-339.

LeCourt, D. (1996). WAC as critical pedagogy: The third stage? JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 16(3), 389-405.

Russell, D.R. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society: An activity theory analysis. Written Communication, 14(4) 504-554.

Schon, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.

Kate Kiefer, Colorado State University 

Kate Kiefer is professor of English and a teacher of composition and writing theory. Her special interests include computers and writing, WAC, and writing about science.