Blog Highlights from this Semester

English 709 Blog Take-Aways

 

The most useful blogs that I wrote this semester were:

Week 2 on Van Woerkum’s “Active Reading,” because it helped me to flesh out concrete strategies for teaching the before, during, and after reading processes. For example, in the pre-reading stage instructors can assess how well students will identify with the chosen readings. In the during reading stage, students can make inferences and connect ideas with other texts through journal assignments, and in the after reading stages, the activation of new ideas is triggered by asking students to establish what they still would like to know, and having them conduct research to connect what they read with other texts.

Week 2 Summary of “A Historical Perspective on Reading Research and Practice” because the article provided a broad and comprehensive overview of specific eras of reading research, such as Behaviorist, Natural Learning, Information Processing, Sociocultural Learning, and Engaged Learning, and how these relate to the particular cultural moments that they emerged within.

Week 3 Summary and Response to two articles by Sugie Goen-Salter on integrated reading and writing were especially useful because they introduced me to the history and principles behind the IRW program at San Francisco State, and laid a foundation for our work on IRW strategies in English 709. My responses also helped me get a head start on the IRW Memo assignment due at the end of the semester.

Week 3 Course for developmental reading/writing students helped me to integrate my own ideas and assignments with the ideas we’d been reading about, including Van Woerkum’s active reading strategies and Goen-Salter’s IRW strategies. I found a way to create assignments using metacognitive strategies and activating schema, so I was glad to be able to connect my prior knowledge of teaching with the new concepts that we’d been discussing in class through this activity.

Week 4 Thoughts on the blogging process helped me to establish my own criteria for a good blog, to justify how I’d been writing blog posts, and it helped me become conscious of why I was finding certain blog posts more useful than others.

Week 4 Summarizing McCormick’s Three Reading Approaches: cognitive, expressivist, and sociocultural, helped to solidify my knowledge after reading McCormick’s book, and became a touchstone that I returned to throughout the semester. The three approaches provided a framework that was very useful for understanding what becomes emphasized (both consciously and unconsciously) in our curriculum. I found myself thinking of ways to integrate all three approaches in my own teaching.

Week 5 Ideas and Elements for my IRW unit plan helped me to integrate concepts and strategies we’d been discussing with my own ideas for an IRW course. I went a bit farther than necessary here and roughly mapped out an entire IRW course when the assignment called for focusing on a unit. However, I was glad that I laid a foundation for the end of semester work on the unit plan, and connected my own ideas with those of the texts and with prior class discussions. 

Week 8 Difficulties with a Challenging Text: This activity was useful because it gave me a sense of what students go through when writing a difficulty paper. I chose a text written by a right-wing ideologue who is known for dismissing the severity of U.S. poverty and viewing the poor as greedy “takers.” I found myself stuck before I could even consider the writer’s ideas because of what I saw as a dismissive and arrogant tone and a lack of concern for the suffering of others. Because I disagreed with the writer’s use of “facts,” I could not “make meaning” of the text. I did try to understand the reasoning behind his arguments and to address which assumptions were underlying the argument. Nonetheless, while the activity resulted in a stalemate, it was a fruitful one because it exposed me to how clashing ideologies can create roadblocks that inhibit true dialogue.

Week 9 Unit Planning Ideas helped me create an initial plan with my group on our American Dream unit. We mapped out particular texts, assignments, and activities that seemed to have potential for our unit, so this assignment helped us to get the ball rolling.

Week 9 Community Building article by Nicholas. I was intrigued by the author’s use of models from Native American tribes for community building. While this could potentially veer into the territory of “cultural appropriation,” I appreciated the author’s emphasis on building classroom communities based on mutual trust, respect, honesty, and consensus building.

Week 10 Bartholomae and Petrosky Chapters 1-3. I was very intrigued by B & P’s radical reconception of a basic reading and writing class. I liked the recursive nature of the writing assignments, and the course’s emphasis on viewing student writing as equivalent to that of published authors. I also think that having students develop their own theories of adolescent growth encourages students to develop a sense of agency and empowerment. While the “seminar-style” of this course would be difficult to execute in today’s community college classroom, I appreciate the values and objectives that this course promotes.

Week 11 The Discovery of Competence: From this book, I was inspired to include assignments in my own teaching that draw on students’ own competence, such as personal narratives, and I’ll ask students to connect their personal experiences to the texts they read. I will encourage students to participate in dialectical and metaphorical kinds of thinking by assigning a dialectical journal which asks them to directly respond to (and provide compelling interpretations of) key passages in the assigned texts. I will try to have students discuss topics that they care about and can become invested in, so that my instruction will “foster both engagement and responsibility” (81).

Week 11 The Discovery of Competence Chapter 9: I agreed with the authors’ approach to teaching multicultural texts, and thought about having my students explore the connection between self and world with a graphic organizer called "Text/Self/World," which gets students to establish an "essential question" that they want to explore, and to find connections between the text, the self, and the larger world. Reading this chapter gave me the idea to assign this graphic organizer in my unit in order to emphasize these relationships. I liked the assignment that asks students to keep observational notebooks in which they record events that reflect the ways in which people are marginalized or left out of the American Dream, based on their personal observations (185).

Week 13 Unit Planning Grid got our group’s unit plan under way by getting us to map out the readings and assignments for our unit, day by day. This was incredibly useful because it set the stage for the rest of our planning and helped us to visualize each stage of the planning process.

Week 16 Memo arguing for an IRW course helped me to recall the major points in Sugie Goen-Salter’s articles, and to connect these points with the strategies and methods that we’ve been discussing all semester in our class. Writing the memo encouraged me to try IRW strategies in my own classes, and I am excited to do so when I teach again in about a month.

Other students’ blogs which were most useful to me include:

Blog posts by Katie Bliss, who uses visual images in innovative and powerful ways. In most of her posts, Katie included pertinent visuals that helped to emphasize the points she was making, and this showed me how I could incorporate iconic images in order to emphasize my points, and to sometimes make a point visually instead of in writing.

Blog posts by Barbara Bradbury, because they would draw on Barbara’s experience as an instructor and offered useful in-class strategies (especially questioning strategies). I was interested in her unit plan project on advertising in the media and liked the use of a variety of texts in this unit, including internet websites, videos, and published texts.

I appreciated Susan Partlan’s critiques of a variety of readings, and especially her useful comments on my own blog and the blogs of others in class, which helped to keep a conversation going among us.

I enjoyed reading Katie Bierbaum’s insights into the readings, as she always brought new and original ideas to each text and interrogated them in useful ways.

I got a lot out of reading the posts on unit planning. It was interesting to see a wide range of possibilities for planning a unit, and to identify how each person’s interests were manifested in their choices of texts and assignments.

Memo arguing for an Integrated Reading and Writing Approach

Dear English Department,

I am writing to you to advocate on behalf of introducing an integrated reading and writing (IRW) approach to teaching composition at our community college. Based on research conducted by Sugie Goen-Salter and Helen Gillotte-Tropp, who are notable pioneers of the integrated reading and writing approach, along with my own experiences from seven years of community college teaching, it is clear that an IRW approach can effectively meet the needs of developmental English students, boosting their abilities as both readers and writers. Above all, an IRW approach would utilize strategies for “students [to] come to read as writers and write as readers” (Goen-Salter and Gillotte-Tropp, “Integrating Reading and Writing” (99), in order to recognize the interconnected aspects of reading and writing. Research conducted during San Francisco State University’s launch of their IRW program has proven that “better writers tend to be better readers, better writers tend to read more than poorer writers, and better readers tend to produce more mature prose than poorer readers” (Goen-Salter, “Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation” 84). By integrating reading and writing into our curriculum, we recognize these interconnections between the reading and writing processes and thereby improve our students’ reading and writing skills simultaneously. The following memo outlines the components of the IRW approach and explains why implementing this approach at our college would provide a more effective and stimulating curriculum for our students.

What is an IRW approach? From an IRW standpoint, reading is no longer secondary to writing, and students instead “see how the structures, practices, and language of each process can enhance understanding of the other” (Goen-Salter and Gillotte Tropp, “Integrating Reading and Writing” 94). There are six fundamental principles upon which an integrated reading and writing approach is based: integration, wherein writing contributes to the development of reading, and vice-versa; time, which takes into account that reading and writing skills develop gradually and within supportive communities; development, which sets a slower pace for the learning process that is more conducive to learning; academic membership, so that at-risk students are incorporated into the mainstream academic community more quickly, thereby ending the cycle of remedial failure and removing the punitive aspect of remedial education; sophistication, which recognizes that basic-level writing classes can be as sophisticated as college-level classes by asking students to work on the same projects, such as reading book-length works and conducting original research; and purposeful communication, which places the teaching of grammar and essay-writing into broader contexts, imbuing the learning process with meaning.

The objectives of the original IRW program at San Francisco State University include: having students read a range of materials and write from a variety of viewpoints and helping students apply these skills both within and beyond their work at the university; developing a metacognitive perspective of reading and writing, involving developing conscious strategies for self-awareness; understanding the rhetorical elements of reading and writing, including purpose, audience, and stance; using reading and writing to engage with the world; and developing enjoyment and confidence in reading and writing through self-assessment.

When IRW courses were first launched at San Francisco State in Fall 2001, student outcomes in the pilot IRW courses were compared with that of a control group. The outcomes showed that “[a]cross all categories of data, students in the integrated reading/writing program outperformed their counterparts in SFSU’s conventional sequence of basic reading and writing courses” (103). It is therefore important for more graduate teaching programs to extensively prepare instructors to teach integrated reading and writing and for our college to consider implementing this innovative approach.

Does IRW work and why is it better than a traditional system where reading and writing are taught separately?

Based upon the experience of implementing the IRW approach at San Francisco State, it is clear that this approach is superior to the traditional approach to separating reading and writing instruction. Sugie Goen-Salter and Helen Gillotte-Tropp’s “Integrating Reading and Writing: A Response to the Basic Writing ‘Crisis,’” argues that the historical tendency to separate reading and writing as distinct processes is a primary contributor to the “basic writing crisis.” In searching for new ways to address administrative attempts to dismantle “remedial” courses, Goen-Salter and Gillotte-Tropp developed the innovative IRW program at San Francisco State, “in which instruction in reading and writing is fully integrated, and students’ movement from the margins of the university to its academic center can be appreciably hastened” (91). The authors cite empirical research showing the links between reading and writing, and the benefits of reading and writing integration. They point out that before the implementation of the IRW program, many basic writing students would remain at the basic writing level well into their second year of enrollment at San Francisco State University. In response, Goen-Salter and Gillotte Tropp developed an accelerated program through which students could join the mainstream academic community and take college-level English courses within one year.

The IRW system was piloted, found to be successful across the board, and eventually replaced the old (two-tier) system. In the old system, students who scored in the lowest quartile of the English Placement Test were required to complete a full year of developmental-level course work in reading and writing by taking separate courses with different instructors; this model was cumbersome and redundant, and failed to alleviate the risk of dis-enrollment from the university that would result if the remediation requirement was not completed in one year.

San Francisco State’s IRW program places at-risk students into a single course which explicitly connects reading and writing and moves these students swiftly from the developmental to college level within one year. Successful completion of the course meets both the CSU remediation requirement and SFSU’s first-year written composition requirement, enabling students to complete in one year what previously took three semesters.

The facts are clear: as Sugie Goen-Salter explains, student retention has improved each year since the IRW program was launched. For the three years of the pilot project, IRW students passed the integrated course at a higher rate than students enrolled in the traditional sequence. Goen-Salter provides detailed tables to demonstrate how these outcomes were measured between the IRW and control groups (see “Integrating Reading and Writing: A Response to the Basic Writing ‘Crisis’”). 

As an instructor, it is also very clear to me that an IRW approach has a more student-centered focus that will engage and meet the needs of the diverse student learners in our community college classes. One of the goals of an IRW approach is “to break down the barrier between text reception and text production, by inviting students to look at a text they read for clues to its production, and a text they produce for clues to how it might be received” (Goen-Salter 86), which occurs alongside the development of metacognitive awareness. Assignments like the “difficulty paper” and KWL+ (in which students establish what they already know about a topic, what they would like to know, and after reading, what they would still like to know/investigate) are designed to promote this kind of self-consciousness about reading and writing processes, and to demonstrate their reciprocal relationship. By situating the assigned readings within both sociocultural contexts and the contexts of our students’ lived experiences, an IRW curriculum can provide meaningful instruction that is relevant to the actual concerns and prior knowledge that our students bring into the classroom, and can thus be a catalyst for deeper insights and critical reflection.

Specific IRW assignments include KWL+, which elicits students’ prior knowledge and encourages further inquiry, along with the “Difficulty Paper,” which asks students to critically assess the roadblocks in their reading process and to make an Action Plan for addressing these issues. These assignments focus on generating knowledge from students’ own experiences and on raising awareness of the processes students go through as readers and writers (metacognitive awareness). As an instructor, I have found that assignments that call for metacognitive awareness lead to an increased interest in and enjoyment of the curriculum, which in turn leads to a greater “buy-in” of the reading and writing skills that we are teaching. In the IRW classroom, students are encouraged to work collaboratively in pairs, small groups, and with the whole class. The goal is to establish a comfortable, stimulating, and productive discourse community where students from all backgrounds can participate and where diverse learning styles can be addressed and validated. Students are supported both intellectually and emotionally through this type of instruction. Moreover, an IRW approach provides an invitation to students to join the academic community more swiftly and smoothly, in part because students are now able to realize their own potential as critical thinkers, readers, and writers.

For all of these reasons, I strongly urge you to consider adopting an integrated reading and writing approach at our community college. I promise that you will not regret this important decision.

Sincerely,

Jordana Finnegan, Ph.D.