Borderland

A student helped me write this post. I’ve been trying to get a grip on some new (for me) ideas about teaching fourth graders about writing with weblogs.

I told my students last week that they could look up information about the historical periods the fictional Time Warp Trio kids traveled to in the books they’re reading. Cool! They were off, using their spare time to “research.” Right away I noticed some glitches. Like, someone typed “time warp trio” into the browser’s URL field – as if the computer was going to magically take them just where they wanted to go, like the kids in the book.

Well, I thought, no harm. It was more of a suggestion than an assignment anyway, and they need to experiment with the researching business. One kid asked me, Can we look things up at home? Uhhh…Yeah. Sure, I said.

Today, though, a little girl brought me a report she’d written at home about the Chisholm Trail. Her Time Warp book goes back to the American frontier in the 19th century. In time-honored tradition, she did an admirable job of copying an article that she knew very little about. She wrote, …With the end of the war, cattlemen needed a new route to market their cattle. Joseph McCoy, an enterprising promoter, was the first to see promise in a shorter, more direct route through Indian Territory to the new railheads slowly moving west through Kansas Territory… I got a little bit worried because I don’t want students making a big effort to regurgitate meaningless information, thinking it will please me.

In the spirit of teaching them about what they use, but confuse, I can see that it’s time to address research skills.

Like I said, my student helped me write this post. I’ve been thinking about how to guide students to become strategic writers, and her problem is a common one for students – how to honestly and coherently express complex new ideas. The 6-Traits Model describes Voice as the quality of writing in which a writer speaks

…directly to the reader in a way that is individual, compelling, and engaging. The writer crafts the writing with an awareness and respect for the audience and the purpose for writing.

This, I think, is at the heart of the issue here. Kids in school are often asked, or think they’re being asked, to subordinate their own knowledge in favor of more authoritative voices. They do this when they write from too great a distance, at too high a level of abstraction, or about things that are too remote from their own experience.

How often do I ask my students to do this? I wonder. What do they think I want them to say? How do they come to know what I value in their work? What did this student think I would like about her report? Why doesn’t she know how I’d feel about this after working with me for so many months? I am not feeling especially clever this year. I should have some success stories to point to. I do, in fact. But they aren’t as interesting to me at the moment.

My thinking on this matter of authentic voice in student writing was rekindled recently when I read an article by Denise Maltese in Voices from the Middle, “Out of the Narrow Tunnel and into the Universe of Discourse” (temporarily available for download from NCTE), in which she explored the impact that James Moffett’s work had on what she called her instructional stance. I like that phrase, instructional stance, for the way that it separates teachers from their methods. Maybe it isn’t what we do, so much as how we do it that makes a difference for kids. Eh?

Though Moffett published some important books for teachers in the late 1960′s, I hadn’t heard of him until very recently. Applebee cited Moffett in his book chapter Alternative Models of Writing Development, where he described a conceptual scheme Moffett developed that associated audience with discourse modes and levels of abstraction for writers.

Denise Maltese supplied additional detail about this model in her article.

Moffett’s schema for teaching the universe of discourse

Maltese pointed out that students need to become aware of their distance from an audience, and from their subject, and to consider the choices for speaking and writing that are available to them. She observed that we can easily push students into working at too abstract a level, which Moffett called “working from scarcity:”

That sort of wrong-headed strategy comes from working too deductively, starting students at high-level abstract topics, or generalities, and then asking them to go down. It puts us in the position of being professional naggers. We are nagging for details, nagging for evidence, nagging for support . . . . It comes from wanting to control the subject matter of student writing and from riding herd on essay before honoring other kinds of writing. (p. 183)

Moffett’s model of the Universe of Discourse shows how abstraction and audience are related to mode of discourse, and it suggests that there is a rich supply of material for writing to be found very near the writer’s own experience.

Personal writing does not preclude us from generalizing or abstracting. With this post, for example, I’m attempting to keep things relevant to my classroom experience, while at the same time making – or trying to, anyway – a larger point about how writing instruction might help students develop an authorial voice as they explore new realms of thought.

Reading about James Moffett sparked my curiosity, and sent me to the university library, where I found a dusty old 1968 edition of Teaching the Universe of Discourse. My quick look-through of the book turned up an interesting section called Abstraction and Curriculum (p. 23-32) in which Moffett explored why schools are problematic learning environments. He advised that students would learn more if we focused on their reasoning processes instead of subject content.

Ideally, a student would spend his time in a language course of study abstracting a large amount of raw material into categories of experience and then into propositions which finally he would combine so as to arrive at new propositions not evident at any of the lower stages. By discussing his productions in a workshop class, he could profit from other points of view, discover what part of his abstracting is peculiar to him and what he shares with a public, and see how the worth of his higher abstractions is determined by the worth of his lower ones. Generally, a student should learn to play the whole symbolic scale, and to know where he is on it at a given moment.

Woah! There it is. …abstracting a large amount of raw material into categories of experience and then into propositions…

Blogging with students in school can help them find a place for their own intellectual activity within a larger social sphere, connecting and synthesizing, reporting and generalizing, corresponding and reflecting for a variety of audiences. In any case, we need to help students see the power of making intertextual links – links between the world of their experience and the world of ideas they encounter, so that these worlds begin to collide. The power of blogging is the power that all discourse offers, the power of self-discovery, which is the proper goal of education.

Sources:

Applebee, A.N. (2000). Alternative Models of Writing Development. In R. Indrisano, & J.R. Squire (Eds.), Perspectives on Writing (pp. 90-110). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Brewbaker, James (2001) “Words on World: Defining English as an Interdisciplinary Subject” The ALAN Review, Volume 28, Number 3, p. 27.

Maltese, D. (2006) Out of the Narrow Tunnel and into the Universe of Discourse. Voices from the Middle, 14(2), 47-56

Moffett, James. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968.