For me, teaching is ultimately intertwined with learning in a way that blurs the boundaries between the two subject positions of learner and teacher. As a teacher, I try to help my students not so much to learn, but how to learn. Yet, my First-Year Writing classes at Florida State University are a place where I, too, am a learner, learning about writing and teaching.

Teaching to Learn
In composition studies, David Bartholomae has argued that every time students sit down to write, they must "invent the university for the occasion," that it is our job to somehow teach students to appropriate the discourse of the academic community. However, over the last few years I've come to believe that my first priority should be students. What happens when we place heavy emphasis on academic discourse as the focus of writing classes? Are we seemingly ignoring the fact that most of our students do write for a variety of contexts outside of the academy before they arrive in college, that they will continue to do so while here, and that they may never write for the academy again once they complete their four year enrollment?

My goal, then, to borrow from Robert Brooke, is to offer students an "invitation to a writer's life." By giving them regularly scheduled writing that is not all academic prose, exposure and response both to and from others in a writing community, and ownership over their texts, it is my belief that I can better empower them for success in any rhetorical situation.

Ownership of the Text: Agency
Robert Brooke's invitation is easily recognized as at the core of Florida State's First-Year Writing program philosophy. Almost all of us require our students to write regularly and use the workshop model for peer response in our classrooms. But the concept of ownership of text is one that must be self-negotiated individually for each teacher, one that becomes a part of us as teachers, and one that arrives from our personal perception of our students.

I think we would all agree that our students come to us from different communities with a variety of educational backgrounds. What we still find is that most secondary schools, even the ones which try to integrate writing-as-a-process pedagogy into their curriculum, are still mired in teaching the five paragraph essay in preparation for standardized testing. Many still concentrate on grammar and correctness at the expense of idea development. This is compounded by the fact that many high school English classes spend a predominant amount of time on reading at the expense of writing.

Consequently, our students often have very generic, limiting views of the writing process, ones in which the teacher is seen as the audience and authority for all texts, a role which we must be careful when assuming. The first step in changing these perceptions about writing and teacher authority is giving students ownership of their texts by letting them (a) choose their own topics and (b) write about things they might choose to write about for themselves. For example, in ENC 1101, my students write personal narratives drawn from their life experiences. Sometimes I invite students to work collaboratively with classmates to come up with a shared list of topics for the semester. In other situations, I usually assign students broad topics which leave them room to negotiate a place for themselves.

Student choice of topics and subject matter is not, in itself, enough for creating agency. In a visit with James Inman, he and I discussed the idea that making students feel uncomfortable with assignments, pushing them into doing new things, looking at issues in new ways, was the zone in which true learning occurs. This idea ties in with Paulo Freire's theories that students must "develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. . . . education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information."

As I perceive it, critical perception of the world is not just restricted to social analyses leading to action and change (typically Freire's agenda, not my own), but also our students' understanding of writing. Putting students in this discomfort zone can happen through normal course design with slight adjustments, such as unusual paper assignments (the How-To Paper) and radical revisions (I regularly use time slice narrative revisions and fat/thin drafts). At the same time, we must also give our students some autonomy from the teacher during the writing process, for, after First-Year Writing, they may never have a writing class again. When a student comes to me to ask "how should I write up this assignment" or "do you think this topic is a good one," it's sometimes a sign that students feel uncomfortable in their new role of taking the responsibility for making their own choices. And it is at that time that I must carefully balance my role of instructor--the authority on writing--and as facilitator--the encourager of learning to learn. The more that I teach, the more that I find that it is the latter which is the hardest to do.

Learning to Teach
As a teacher, it's not only important for me to put students in situations where they can become more autonomous as writers, but I also continually push myself into the discomfort zone. I experiment and revise, teaching classes with different topics and reworking old syllabi when teaching the same again. I've taught a variety of First-Year Writing courses including ENC 1102 Online: Writing · Researching · Reading the World Wide Web, Writing Short Stories (see Course Information and Course Calendar), and Writing About Star Trek. Part of teaching a variety of classes also includes modifying exercises that I get from others to fit the new curriculum (see the image invention exercise which was developed from separate presentations by different teachers) and creating my own assignments.

As a researcher in computers and writing, I generally integrate some form of electronic discourse into my classes. Many of my students, when asked if they read and write outside of class, will answer no. But when asked if they use email, chat or read the Internet, the answer is usually yes. Why? Because reading and writing is associated with school. Using the Internet is their play. Given that they are personally engaged in reading and writing the Net, I feel that I can help them become critical thinkers about the texts that they encounter.

At the same time, teaching students about electronic discourse is also an opportunity for me to expand my understanding of computers and writing. For example, the Star Trek Web Site for my Writing About Star Trek class was the first serious attempt I had ever made at creating a site with a specific theme or unifying graphical content. It was a hit with the students, and from learning about creating web pages with that site, I've been able to move on to teach the web zine in ENC 1102. More recently, I've been using open source content management systems as a class platform, allowing students to share their writing via blogging (see my class site from this summer and my current one).

And . . .
Toward the end of the semester, I met with the student author of Good Is not Good Enough in conference on his next project. We were discussing his text, and I made a suggestion. He agreed that he had tried the idea in an earlier draft, but that his group didn't like it. You see, his drafting was always experimental: he always put himself in that discomfort zone while most students fought to get out of it. His group didn't see innovation; they saw undesirable deviation from the standard discourses with which they are familiar. But I was excited, for that author was the kind of student and writer I want them all to be. The kind of writer and teacher I strive to be.

Last updated, Fall 2003.