Raise or Raze?

In developing a philosophy for teaching composition, it is perhaps a great idea to first determine what I think makes good writing from a teacher’s perspective. To facilitate this thought, I will consider how the four main theoretical perspectives on teaching composition might engage this task: a text-oriented approach, a context/culture approach, a writer-oriented approach, and a reader-oriented approach. Overall, there are things that I love in every single one of the perspectives.

But a point I feel most uncomfortable with is the idea of “a more text-oriented teacher approach. What I am struggling with in this theory of writing is an understanding that writing has to be perfect. This formalist view of good writing is objective and leaves  no room for error or opinions. Writing fulfills a convention and the teaching of this is pretty much parallel with prescriptive grammar and formal logic. It seems very rigid and controlling and if I were to focus my teaching on this style of writing, I would be pushing papers, grading on whether or not my students could “copy my perfectly-designed models that I provide them.”

I have to admit that I did have to teach this way for a couple of years. I was working with far below basic students and I had to begin at the beginning – I had to teach them absolutely everything about writing and the only way that I could teach them was to provide models and have them spit it back out to me. By the end of the year, I was able to see more of their personal writing in their essays but it took almost the entire class year to get to that point. There wasn’t any tension at this school with other colleagues because everyone else was doing the same thing that I was doing. But the other teachers spent most of the year just having students do narrative writings where I wanted to have the students learn compare/contrast, argumentative, and research writing. They didn’t have the same faith in the students’ writing abilities that I did or maybe it was because they didn’t have a lot of training to teach writing outside of their secondary teaching credentials. At this point, I already has a MA in TESOL. In any case, I think this text-oriented approach is sometimes a teacher’s only option in order to prepare students for academic success.