The most common depiction of a college composition instructor over the past 15 years is a critical skills teacher shaping student literacy, intellectual and cultural development through pedagogies of social justice and political analysis.
The idea is to empower students to take responsibility for their own learning and while doing so teach not only reading, writing and thinking, but also a more critical analysis for social change and engagement. Teaching writing for social justice involved making students aware of middle class consumerism, making students aware of issues like social class inequities, racial issues, gender issues, discrimination/prejudice issues and a desire for students to use their writing skills to correct social injustice. Trainor (2002) wanted to teach writing for social justice to help white middle class writing students to become aware of their whiteness and how to use their white privilege to help correct social injustice.
After 1965 when the Civil Rights Act was enacted, English Composition theory took a social turn. Writing teachers started teaching writing to teach students to have a voice of their own. Foucault said that writing is to give voice to the voiceless. The purpose of English Composition class became a call to social justice. Students become social critics denouncing inequalities. Students were encouraged to write in their own authentic voices. Rhetorical English Composition was seen as too formal, too logical and teachers in the 60's, 70's and 80's wanted a more natural approach to writing to reflect the liberal social atmosphere of that time.
In writing classes, English Composition theory experienced what Smagorinsky titled, The Social Turn where composition teachers taught students to write to change society--to answer the call for tolerance in a multicultural American society. Part of the Social Turn movement was to empower minority students.
Teachers accepted Black English as an acceptable way to write although this was considered controversial by many English teachers who still preferred their students to learn Standard English.
In Asian American Literature, for instance, Frank Chin and others wrote Asian American Literature depicting the recognition of Asian Americans as people, as Americans, not just as yellow face stereotypes seen in the mainstream media. Every social group wanted their turn in the sun to proclaim their rightful existence alongside the 'Black is beautiful' movement of the 70's.
In Bilingual Education, ESL teachers were encouraged to use the multicultural backgrounds of ESL students or ELL to enrich the mainstream content area curriculum. ESL teachers partnered up with ESL communities and ESL parents to teach ESL students about American culture and to teach parents how they can participate in the education process of their children while allowing ELL to maintain their heritage culture.
In my Social Studies class, my Social Studies teacher taught us about stereotypes of other ethnic groups. For instance, I had no idea that Irish people were stereotyped as being drunks all the time. And shamefully, I had no idea Africa had modern cities with electricity. My Social Studies teacher taught us about social justice and social inequality because he wanted us to be have critical thinking skills and be active in the social justice movement.
In English Composition Theory, this became the Writing For Social Justice movement. The idea was to teach students to write in order so students could have an active voice in society to fight social injustice. In his book, Research on Composition, Multiple Perspectives on Two Decades of Change, Peter Smagorinsky called this the Social Turn because that's when English Composition theory focused on the sociopolitical not just the cognitive approach to writing. Smagorinsky says, the Social Turn in English Composition Theory included more focus on a student's cultural background and to tell teachers like Ovando did in his book (Cultural Deficit Theory) not to judge a student based on their economic shortcoming.
I enjoyed teaching my students multiple points of view and I especially enjoyed teaching students about literature, writing or history by teaching these subjects from the point of view of different ethnic groups in order to not only focus on reading and writing skills, but also add a cultural component to make ethnic students feel more visible and motivate them to stay in school.
When I taught ENGL101 Freshman Composition and ENGL 102 Critical Thinking class,I taught my students the difference between fact and fiction and I taught my students about fallacies so that they can tell fact from propaganda and not to fall for the propaganda. I also taught students about media bias. I made them aware that some TV channels leaned to the left, while another leaned to the right. I taught my students to critique what they hear and to think for themselves and construct knowledge for themselves. Once students understood what fallacies were, they were able to take a more active part in social change and engagement. The debates we used to have about current events, fallacies, media bias were the most rewarding of all the topics I taught in my writing classes.
For the most part, my English writing classes still focused on how to write a thesis statement or a 5 paragraph essay but I let students know that if they had good writing skills, they could persuade the reader to do anything within reason or believe in anything as long as my students had a central thesis and backed up that thesis with credible evidence.
I want my students to learn how to write in an authentic way that integrates their own lived experiences with the research that they do to create writing that empowers students to make change in society. I will write about in my next blog about why I love to teach literature for social justice.
However, Durst (1999) found there were some students who disliked having to write for social justice in a composition class and that these students only wanted to learn writing skills in a writing class so teachers have to respect students who want to focus more on writing skills like how to write different kinds of essays for work than writing for social justice. When I teach writing, I do a needs analysis of my class, and I can get a pretty good idea what my students want and need. Before teaching any class, regardless of content area, it is always a good idea to do a needs analysis of the class and get to know your class first so you can adjust your lessons to the interests and needs of your class.
If students mainly want to learn writing skills, then you just stick to the writing skills. When discussing social issues, you find students excited about social justice, then you can teach writing for social justice. I always find it most useful to teach to what my students needs and wants are. At my last school, teachers were required to know what the goals students have in taking a class to improve teaching goals and they called this "cognitive presence"--that is a teacher's knowledge of what their students want from a class.
No comments:
Post a Comment