Change Essay

Yifang Xu

Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

EDUC 606: Literary Theory, Research, and Practice 

Alesha Gayle Mays

April 17th, 2022

 Change Essay

What is the meaning of writing? Before coming to the Reading/Writing/Literacy

program, I didn't think I was good at writing, and even more I don’t like writing. Writing in my

eyes is mostly school-oriented for exams and homework. Writing a piece is only for finishing a

studying task. After submitting the paper, I will make it dust-laden and never go back to

reflecting. After being a literacy practitioner, I asked several students opinions about writing.

Most feedback I received was that writing is tedious, struggling, and meaningless. Why is

writing so annoying?

In my learning process, I constantly reflect that writing is a part of literacy learning and is

a written form to make human express themselves and communicate with each other. Writing is

the clarification of meaning, the exchange of ideas, and thus sharing the world together.

However, teachers who teach writing fundamentally do not believe that students can write well,

let alone become writers. In this essay, my focus is that as writing teachers, trying to start from

positive attitudes that every student is a writer and could be a good writer is the priority for

students’ writing class.

Freire’s (1970) banking concept of education critiqued teachers’ authoritative and

subjective position. By regarding and putting students as passive and ignorant receivers, teachers

bestow and deposit knowledge to students without considering students’ inquiry. In other words,

in teachers’ educational concept and pedagogy, they don’t believe that students are great thinkers

and resist dialogic or mutual communication. I think this banking concept is ingrained in some

writing teachers’ educational guidelines. And if teachers are eager to help students improve their

writing, and furthermore, lead them to develop interest and motivation in writing, we should get

rid of this idea ideologically.

 With the development of economy and technology, and the rapid evolution of society, it

seems that everything can be quantified and programmed. In the 2011 National Assessment of

Educational Progress (NAEP), for the survey about Grade 8 and Grade 12 students, only one-

quarter of students perform at the proficient level in writing, and most students just meet the

requirement of basic, which means they partially master the fundamental writing skills. In

school’s writing projects, before asking students’ diverse and flexible ideas about how to get into

writing, teachers directly and arbitrarily dump the template writing skills. The question comes to

why by using such an “accurate and efficient” teaching pedagogy, students’ writing is still

lingering in the same place? My thinking is that the idea of writing is gradually narrowed toward

the standardized exams, and the essays written under the template teaching are similar to each

other, thus confining the students’ critical and creative thinking.

Yagelski (2012) proposed the idea that learning writing needs us to make a distinction

between writing as textual production and writing as an approach to know ourselves and

understand the world. However, teachers’ focus is exam-oriented, making them devalue and

neglect students’ writing ability. For teacher’s training, writing is often being left behind by

literature and reading. For writing teachers themselves, study shows some of them could feel that

classroom practices were not well matched with their own beliefs, and even themselves have

huge anxiety about writing and have nothing to say when start writing (Whitney, 2008). What’s

worse, they hold a strong stereotype that students who deviate from “standard written English”

cannot be a writer (Zapata & Laman, 2016). Therefore, writing teachers should firstly reform and

transform their fragmented writing concept. A shift in perception starts from that “[s]eeing youth

as writers, presuming their writing competence, and believing their stories is essential to

successful literacy outcomes” (Haddix, 2018, P.10). In this way, students will firstly restore
confidence that we are all writers. Once students find that their voices can be heard, their ideas

are being recognized and valued, they will gradually gain self-motivated interest in exploring

writing.

Especially, teachers need to spurn the idea that nondominant students are deviant and

inferior to White English speakers. Instead, they are suggested to establish the view that “cultural

and linguistic resources of the diverse participants were strategically combined to promote

learning” (Gutiérrez et al., 1999, p.300; Villegas et al., 2021). For these students coming from

diverse backgrounds, writing teachers are supposed to encourage them to combine their

experiences with writing, using bilingual background to help them think deeply, and therefore,

understanding and reflecting who they are and be proud of where they are from. In addition, I

envisage that teachers could be the co-author with students. Compared with reading and

listening, writing is a more subjective task. For example, either in the TOEFL or GRE test, we

can see that although there is an E-reader, writing still needs real person proofread. Hence, I

usually hear that writing teachers complain about the difficulty in reading and evaluating

students’ writings. So, why not think about it from the other side, asking students how they

would like us to read their paper (Ellsworth, 1996). Making reading papers and giving feedback

as an extension of classroom relationship and a platform for teacher-student communication,

teachers can scaffold students’ thinking and polishing of their writing papers. Pederson (2018)

also considered that viewing reading students’ papers as a conversation could enhance students’

own comprehension. In a traditional reading paper’s way, teachers give authoritative feedback,

but students must appropriate their own thinking toward teachers’ single and unified perspective.

However, it’s students who are the main body of their own works. Furthermore, the teacher-

student relationship is supposed to grow toward a collaboration and mutual learning form.
Instead of top-down teaching theory, teachers can always learn from students (Simon, 2013).

Every time when we are writing students’ essays, we should anticipate what students bring to us

and how they make sense of their lives toward this world.

Writing is not a unilateral output, but mutual progress after communication. Basically,

transforming concepts is the primary step for writing teachers, and furthermore, putting theory

into practice is a sustaining and industrious process. However, by taking transformative actions

such as teachers participating in writing projects (Whiteny, 2008), they also reported the

anxieties like having no idea about how to start writing. Therefore, by taking transformative

actions with students together, writing teachers will be able to have more understanding of

students' difficulties and problems, thus making progress together.

In conclusion, in this essay I generally talk about how I hope teachers could

fundamentally reject the idea of teaching hierarchy. Teachers and students are both dynamic and

mutual learning is subjective. By admitting every student could be a writer, teachers not only

need to improve their own training programs, but also make full use of writing feedback to

communicate and collaborate with students.

References:

Ellsworth, E. (1996). Situated response‐ability to student papers. Theory into Practice, 35(2),

138-143.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.

Gutiérrez, K. D., Baquedano‐López, P., & Tejeda, C. (1999). Rethinking diversity: Hybridity and

hybrid language practices in the third space. Mind, culture, and activity, 6(4), 286-303.

Haddix, M. M. (2018). What's Radical about Youth Writing?: Seeing and Honoring Youth

Writers and Their Literacies. Voices from the Middle, 25(3), 8-12.

Pedersen, J. (2018). Revision as dialogue: Exploring question posing in writing

response. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 62(2), 185-194.

Simon, R. (2013). " Starting with What Is": Exploring Response and Responsibility to Student

Writing through Collaborative Inquiry. English Education, 45(2), 115-146.

Villegas, K., Yin, P., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (2021). Interrogating Languaging Through Power,

Race, and Space in the Schooling of Translingual Student Populations. In Handbook of

Urban Education (pp. 296-310). Routledge.

Whitney, A. (2008). Teacher transformation in the national writing project. Research in the

Teaching of English, 43(2), 144-187.

Yagelski, R. P. (2012). Writing as praxis. English Education, 44(2), 188-204.

Zapata, A., & Laman, T. T. (2016). " I write to show how beautiful my languages are":

Translingual Writing Instruction in English-Dominant Classrooms. Language Arts, 93(5),

366-378.