11/12 - Supporting Writing in Your Discipline

The readings this week stress an idea that comes as no shock: that writing is increasingly important in today’s careers and daily life and that it needs more attention in the classroom.

This reminds me of something I heard in Ken Burns’s documentary about the Vietnam War (sorry, I don’t have the time to rewatch the whole series to find the name/exact words of the speaker). Describing the use of body counts as a proxy for progress in the war, one man said that  “sometimes when what is most important is hard to measure, what you can measure becomes more and more important.” Dehumanization through numbers aside, the fact that the number of Vietnamese people being killed was equated with success led to more deaths instead of better strategy. While of course it is not impossible to measure student writing, it is more difficult to do than with skills that appear most often in standardized tests. Not enough time is allocated to learning critical writing because improvement is determined by changes in those test scores.

People saw images and body count reports from the war on the nightly news (Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine)

In “Write Like This,” Gallagher argues that one way to focus more on writing in a meaningful way is to find real-world discourses in your discipline. Looking at not just the disciplinary content contained in such texts but at how they are formatted can be a model to students. Students will be writing for different purposes in their future. Thus, it makes sense for us to find texts, traditional and non-traditional, that communicate disciplinary thinking.

(Left: A mathematician’s proof of existence/uniqueness of GCF from a Number Theory textbook. Right: YouTuber’s visual explanation of how to use proportional reasoning to find the heights of Mario’s friends knowing he is 5’1”.)

Similarly, the teacher can be a model for writing. Just as we might use Think Alouds while reading disciplinary texts, we can share how we are deciding what to include as we write in front of students. In math, that means describing why I’m using certain numbers and symbols to convey meaning and how the order and spacing I choose will have meaning.

The “Writing Next” report has some good guidance for how to teach students the distinctive qualities of writing in your discipline. Reading the list of eleven elements for teaching writing made my reflect on notable efforts of my past teachers to improve my writing.

Summarizing is commonly taught, but I had one high school teacher who did it in a memorable way. After every reading assignment, we had to write the most detailed and representative summary possible using only 25 words. Revising those summary sentences was often part of the class. We would talk to the members of our table and come up with one 25-word statement together. Or we considered one group’s sentence and suggested what could be removed or added. The statements that we wrote at the bottom of the articles were useful to us as we planned and drafted papers.

Collaborative Writing stuck out to me because I don’t think I have ever been given good instruction in how to do anything more than brainstorm or edit as a team. Yet, team writing is something common to many careers (and in college academics). In trying to be efficient with time, groups I have been in usually try to divide tasks and sections of a paper. When I gave such a draft to one professor, he called it “Frankenstein’s Monster.” We had to rewrite substantial portions of the paper, and it ended up taking much more time than if we had worked separately. Like us, students will struggle with team dynamics and efficiency in their writing.

Reading about the spoken word poetry unit as an example of culturally sustaining pedagogy led me to consider what that might look like within my discipline. I am still grappling with what non-dominant forms of mathematical reasoning are and how I can encourage those perspectives in my class. Since I like to think of math as an articulation of what our intuition tells us, perhaps I could have students explore how they use some form of math to make decisions that are unique to them: from deciding which line to get into at the store to choosing a place to live.

What specific things will you do to teach students how to write well in your discipline? Have your former teachers provided any good models for you? And how will you do this in a culturally sustaining way?