Carolyn Ostrander

Undergraduate writing instruction, and in particular first-year writing instruction, is an exciting proposition. At its best, writing courses participate in and help shape the lifelong development of writers. It encompasses both writing to learn and writing with purpose.

“Writing to learn” occurs when student/readers observe new uses for writing by other writers and try them out for themselves. Incoming college students often expect writing to continue to be defined by their experiences in high school, which often focused on drills in specific genres (e.g. 5-paragraph argument and personal experience essays). They have written in testing situations that defined what they could express and how they could shape it. As a result many undergraduates begin with a sense of repression and even aversion to (assigned) writing.

In spite of this, most students have also developed very specific skills and interests in writing in their own lives – for instance, in fan fiction, in social media, and through gaming networks, employment, and creative expression.

I want students to appreciate their own work within a broad range of genres and styles, and to realize what developing new skills will help them do. I want them to learn how to consider the context, audience and purpose of writing in order to plan and execute compositions in different fields with a variety of media. In addition, I invite students to become more deeply involved in a community that consists of readers, writers, thinkers and doers actively engaged in ongoing dialogue. All of this starts with reading and experimenting as students become attuned to these ongoing conversations and their potential place within them.

In contrast to many students’ previous experience, the genres, questions, and opportunities available to them now depend on the initiative each student takes to uncover issues, facts, and the “available means of persuasion.” Their willingness to engage with texts reveals the value of their ideas. By extension, students’ own openness to experimentation within their own writing and thinking is the gateway to greater facility for students and to greater relevance for the work of the composition course. Often the impulse to employ familiar genres and themes takes over the composition process before students can fully explore specific assignments or texts with challenging structures. For some, this is the biggest barrier to success.

My approach to the first-year writing classroom, therefore, is focused on breaking through preconceptions about the kind of writing that is being assigned to them, not only in my own class, but across the curriculum. This is accomplished by emphasizing analysis early in the composition process and as a necessary part of revision. Students need to develop the capacity to analyze their own work as well as the texts they are assigned. To aid in this development, every class focuses on specific aspects of the writing process, but also includes chances to compose, either individually or collaboratively. Group activities are signed by the participants and displayed in a “gallery” at the end of class sessions, and peer audiences are invited to respond to the work that has been posted.

We also develop an iterative analysis process, in which early readings and student writing for the course are referenced again when we take up, for example, disciplinary differences in rules for establishing “knowledge” and “truth.” Over time these results are collected in a chart that helps reinforce the transferability of skills and compositional strategies across different kinds of texts and images.

Writing is part of how classroom lessons become relevant; but only in proportion to the tools available to students. Through writing, critical thinking develops into a habitual approach and adds to a developing toolkit of ways to ask questions and find answers. To accomplish these things, both writing and teaching must respond, not only to the content of the course, but also to the classroom “audience” – students as well as instructors.

As an educator I am sensitive to factors that interfere with learning in the teaching situations presented to me, whether it is the college classroom or one of the many workshops I have taught or co-taught in camps, schools, homes, and college classrooms to train parents, teachers and interpreters to communicate with students who are d/Deaf. I rely on previous classroom experiences, but also on my studies in educational psychology, linguistics and literacy education and on years of experience as an academic advisor – years in which close and reflective listening was a primary tool. I bring critical consciousness to the task of identifying and responding to student needs, and have worked to transfer my urgency about the complexity of the issues that affect access to the classroom to my students in the form of exercises that build experience, familiarity, opportunity and confidence in the academic environment.

In order to do so, I have developed strategies to address a wide diversity of backgrounds, ages, and experiences among the students in my classes as well as to engage students who resist mandated training or fear failure. I strive to demonstrate to students that they can ultimately be successful, although that is not always the outcome within the confines of a particular class.

My approach is to blend a defined curriculum with flexible classroom strategies. Content and skills are always at the center of my teaching plan, but I know that my delivery of particular content can vary widely in response to an audience and still be successful. I believe that greater and more confident student participation leads to a more dynamic exchange of ideas and greater transferability of skills; it is part of my job to understand how to select and employ the media and styles that draw students into active engagement.

This is confirmed by my observation of students and teachers. I have worked in institutions of education since the late 1980s, first in K-12 and later in adult education and university settings, including nearly a decade of work as an educational interpreter. I repeated nearly every word that was uttered by teachers and students during classes, requiring close observation of teacher-student interactions. As an academic advisor, I have listened to hundreds of students describing classroom interactions and assignments in the context of their own aspirations, fears, successes and failures. The skills and lessons drawn from these experiences help me listen carefully – even rhetorically – and at the same time help me formulate questions that can help students identify their own problems and strategies for solving them – another critical thinking and composing skillset for students.

Good teaching can’t ensure entrance into privileged places but it can provide important tools for listening, for writing, and for critical thinking that help students understand and choose to use – or choose to resist – the forces and institutions that are shaping all our lives.