For the past third of my career teaching composition, I’ve been trying to recreate the flow of the first two thirds. I think that finally I have a clue about how to do this from reading Peter Elbow’s recent book Vernacular Eloquence. The title is a play on Dante’s treatise Vulgaris Eloquence, a defense of the use of everyday Latin.

On the cover of the book after the title is the phrase “what speech can bring to writing.” Elbow argues passionately that spoken English is not inferior to written English, that, in fact, it offers spontaneity, voice, and liveliness, all qualities that good writing, exemplified by good literature, needs. Today a common complaint is that students write like they talk, that texting, blogging, and other “talky” forms of writing are corrupting Standard Edited English. Elbow sees this charge as class warfare. He looks to the past to show how historically the upper classes have deemed their language superior. He looks to linguistics to prove that no language is inherently inferior or superior to another.

Anticipating that some readers will see Elbow’s ideas as grounds for an “anything goes” approach, he defends his position. He distinguishes between careless and careful writing and insists that good writing is careful, but that the carelessness of early drafts comes before the polished final. He understands that he will have detractors and that his ideas make take time to take root, just as free writing did.

I’ve never read a book quite like this one. It is much denser than my other favorite, Writing Without Teachers. It’s taken me weeks to finish it because it contains dozens of references to scholars, linguists, social scientists, writers, and philosophers. That Elbow spent years writing this book and that he talked obsessively about it to anyone who would listen is not surprising. There’s an urgency to the book, a call for massive change in attitude and approach to teaching writing.

Here are some of Elbow’s ideas about how to mine speaking for writing:

1. Use free writing.
2. Let writing “speak on to the page.”
3. Read writing aloud for syntax, rhythm, and flow.
4. Trust the ear as writing has an aural quality. (He acknowledges that for people  who don’t speak correctly that this can be tricky.)
5. Use sentence outlines that link ideas instead of static word or phrase outlines.
6. Formulate the thesis after exploration in writing, not before.
7. Adopt a nonjudgmental attitude to writers and to writing. Of course, this doesn’t mean no grades.

Even though Elbow’s ideas seem best suited to personal writing, he claims that they will carry over into engaging critical writing as well. I agree with him that quality academic writing is hardly voiceless.

Early in my teaching career, before I knew anything about writing theory, my colleagues whisked me off to a conference in Memphis. Peter Elbow was there. He was offbeat, fired up about writing, and inspirational. Last year, I stood in line at the 4 C’s to get an autographed copy of his new book. Elbow looked quite distinguished with silver hair, his suit and tie. I had no clue that the ideas in his new book would help dissolve the resistance I’ve been feeling from my students.

This semester I am talking to my composition classes about Elbow and using his techniques. My students like them, too. As one of them  said, “This feels more natural.”

So, to Peter Elbow, I say, “Thanks for the revolution. Count me in.”

I, like Karen, want my students to see themselves as writers.  Right now, I’m neck-deep in grading my first batch of essays for the year, a writing reflection project that asks students to examine how technology has affected their writing.  During class discussions surrounding this project, I have come to realize the extent to which my students are already writers: they spend alarming amounts of time texting, Tweeting, posting Facebook status updates, and even blogging, or at least commenting on blogs – about real issues, for real audiences (though not academic ones).  Part of me finds this terrifying; we’ve all graded essays in which students slipped into text speak, failing to capitalize first-person singular pronouns and phonetically substituting numbers for words.  But I have also come to see that some of the writing skills our students practice every day could easily transition to the college writing classroom.  In the tradition of numbered lists offered by Kathleen and Deborah, below are a few of the lessons my students have taught me during this project:

1.  Social networks generate heightened audience awareness.  Ask your students if they’ve ever posted a Facebook status that was misinterpreted or watched a single ill-advised tweet destroy a friendship.  These are hard lessons in audience awareness, and they occur in a real-world context.  Students are often very mindful of who sees what they post online; they know exactly how many followers they have on Twitter, and they’re eager to boost those numbers.  They’re often Facebook friends with parents, former teachers, and potential career contacts, and they’re acutely aware of how their status updates will “play” for mixed audience groups.
2. “Brevity is the soul of wit.”  Shakespeare’s Polonius gave us a few pithy gems, and this is certainly one of them.  Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters; most cellular plans limit texts to 160.  These limitations do, of course, give rise to the kinds of shorthand that strike horror into the souls of writing teachers, but they can also encourage writers to eliminate wordiness.  Students often write and rewrite tweets in an effort to convey complex observations within the character limit, and their goal is to make those thoughts worthy of re-tweeting.  They’re experts in the nuances of hashtags, using these as efficient rhetorical devices to link their tweets to others that they see as similar in theme or content.
3. They’re already joining conversations.  One of the basic skills of academic writing that we struggle to teach in first-year composition is the art of “joining the conversation.”  Many of our students are active blog readers, and they regularly comment on posts.  Look at the comments section of a blog (this blog, for example), and you’ll notice that it’s set up like a conversation.  It starts with people responding to the original post, but then some responders get responses, which can generate entirely new discussions.  Many of our students are already adept at joining ongoing conversations on blogs or Facebook pages; we can capitalize on those skills and adapt them to academic contexts.
4. Many of them hate the shorthand as much as we do.  This was the lesson that surprised me most.  In their reflections, many of my students wrote about judging others who posted grammatically incorrect status updates filled with spelling errors (intentional or otherwise) and shorthand as “lazy” or “uneducated.”  Those students went on to say that, because they judged others so harshly, they were careful not to commit those same offenses, lest they be judged as well.  In the forum of social networking, students recognize what’s at stake when they fail to proofread.  We could exploit this consciousness by linking grammar and proofreading explicitly to the kind of self-presentation that happens online.

I’m not a trendy – or a particularly tech-savvy – teacher.  I’ve never had a Facebook or Twitter account; I read very few blogs, and I usually comment only if there’s a prize involved.  My students know far more than I do about social networking.  Their essays made me realize that I could use the knowledge my students already have to start a conversation about writing that doesn’t insist on separating “papers for school” from real writing, and that acknowledges their expertise as writers.  I look forward to seeing all of you at the Transitioning symposium, and I’m eager to hear what your students are teaching you!

When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

That proverb was once my mantra. On the days early in my career when I would leave class with an aching head and a sore throat, I would surrender to forces beyond my control all the shrugging, eye rolling, discouraging responses, and awkward, if not chaotic, offerings I had received in response to my assignments, advice, and exhortations.  That  ageless wisdom offered me the comfort of resignation. But I have come to recognize that I can’t afford that comfort. That mystical philosophy has a very selective application for me now. I summon it up only in regard to those “students,” probably here for the grant money, who have no intention of doing anything more than showing up for class with a cell phone and a coke (and a blank stare I couldn’t penetrate with a power drill).

But those students are not the subject of this post. I want to talk about those other students on the edge, the ones who sometimes give inspiringly beautiful answers when I ask them, as I routinely do on the first day of every semester, in effect, “Why are you here and what do you want?” Many of these students also lack readiness, an academic unreadiness compounded–because many of them are first-generation college students–by an unawareness of what the culture of higher education requires of them.  Helping students learn how to learn is a monumental challenge for all who teach in the open admissions, two-year college setting, as I do, but I think those of us who teach writing have a special struggle because we know, whereas students may not, how central writing is going to be to their learning throughout their college years. The readiness to learn to write better so that one might learn everything else better is a quality I want for all my students, especially the ones whose future academic success may be at risk. And rather than wait for it, I now try to cultivate it.

I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

Like most of my kind, I am a reader, and I have relied heavily on books to guide and support me through just about everything I have undertaken in life. I was fortunate as a graduate student at two universities to have been exposed through reading and conferencing to some of the best thinking and practices in Comp /Rhet studies.  Probably because of all that on-paper learning, I began what has grown into a 20+year career at the community college with the air of a stone-cold know-it-all. Such arrogance does not invite trust, especially from those who are already scared of their teachers. In short, some humbling was in order. Experience does indeed run “a dear school,” and I imagine many people whose names I don’t even recall paid the price over the years for my ignorance, but, thankfully, I can report now that I have learned some important lessons, among them discernment, patience, flexibility, and renewed optimism.

Never one to diss book learning, however, I have tried during my teaching career to maintain some  acquaintance with scholarship for composition teachers, and I continue to be impressed, even awed, by the many talented and passionate authorities out there. While I could recite an epic roll call of inspirations here (because nothing I do in the classroom is original), I prefer to take an approach similar to Kathleen’s in her recent post, possibly more for my own benefit than for others’, and try to articulate some of what I think I now know  about how to teach underprepared writing students.

When the teacher is ready, the student appears.

1. Students who are not fully at home in a classroom profit from feeling a sense of community. From Day One, I encourage them to know their classmates.
2. Students need compassionate guidance in how to respect The Classroom, not just the people in it. I try to show them that I view the classroom as a singular place where great things can happen if everyone does his or her part.
3. The better prepared students are often a rich source of help to their peers. I try regularly to create collaborative activities for them.
4. While the better prepared students may be of help to their peers, they should not be expected to sit in judgment of each other.
5. All students, especially the underprepared ones, need a teacher who does not try to pass herself off as just another  peer. I am not afraid to speak with authority and tell them when they are wrong in those aspects of writing that are a matter of right and wrong.
6. All students, particularly the underprepared, need lots of modeling, and not just canned modeling. When appropriate, and as authentically as I can, I share my own writing processes with students.
7. Underprepared writers need a safety net, a system of second chances that aims ultimately for independence and responsibility. I allow students at the semester’s end to revise and resubmit one or two earlier works–with the understanding that a rise in grade is not automatic.

Seven is always a good number to have, so I will stop the list there and close by saying how much I look forward to learning more about teaching writing at the upcoming Transitioning Symposium. I am excited about hearing the invited speakers as well as my fellow writing teachers in the high schools, other community colleges, and universities of our state. I sincerely appreciate once again the opportunity to be part of this very important event.

See you on the 28th!

As I move into my third week teaching an advanced writing class to juniors and seniors on my campus, most of whom have recently finished a degree at a community college and are now transferring into the four-year system, I’ve found myself reflecting more on my teaching of writing. At the beginning of every semester, I ask my students to reflect back on their educational experience with writing classes, and as I read about their experiences, I always think about my own teaching and writing too. As Karen wrote in an earlier blog post, I want my students to see themselves as writers, and because of that, I want to approach them as a fellow writer. I take this approach of a fellow writer with my students because every year, I’m shocked at how many believe that they cannot write and that they are just bad writers, and this startling realization always hurts my heart. This semester, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how our students get to this belief.

And then I started to think about Oprah. In every issue of her magazine, Oprah writes a final column called “What I Know For Sure.” And as much as I could spend this entire article talking about Oprah, who I’ve watched from a very early age, I only want to say one thing about Oprah – she inspires people to improve themselves and to improve their lives. That’s why her fans talk about her like she literally comes into their homes every day, or at least she did until her little Chicago show got cancelled; she gets her message across to her audience in ways that we can all learn a lot from. Now, I’m not saying I’m the Oprah of writing teachers, but I think we can learn a lot from her. And so I decided that I need to articulate my “What I Know for Sure” about writing and share it with my students, so here’s what I plan on letting my students know from my experience as a writing teacher and as a writer.

1. Writing well is always hard work. It’s difficult to articulate our thoughts and ideas in such a way that other people will know, will understand, and will be interested in what we write. And writing tasks change, have different styles, formats, audiences, and purposes; and so just because we write one thing well (like a personal narrative), sometimes it can be difficult to move those skills over into other kinds of writing (like a research paper). And writing always involves transitions.
2. There is no such thing as bad writers, only writers who give up or become apathetic and discouraged. Because if you don’t lose that momentum as a writer, and you keep revising and working on that piece of writing, you can turn coal into diamonds. Sometimes, you have to sit on it awhile and sometimes you have to be under a lot of pressure, but diamonds can be made from little black lumps.
3. Everybody needs their Dr. Phil as a writer, and sometimes we need a Dr. Oz too. We need someone to come on our show and give us that tough love like only Dr. Phil can do. And sometimes, we need a Dr. Oz to explain to us the mechanics and workings of how our writing is digested by readers. Writing just does not occur in a vacuum and we need people who care about us enough to gently explain things to us and to motivate us to do better in our work. This is why I’ve always had a passion for writing center work because consultants there are really just interested readers.
4. Revision is where real writing occurs. As Anne Lamott explains in Bird by Bird, most of us have “shitty first drafts” that we’d be embarrassed by. And countless writing scholars also explain that good writers revise. Journey and Glee had it right, “Don’t stop believing.”
5. Writing is a process, but as Ellen Shelton pointed out in her earlier blog, it’s not one process that works well every time for every person on every project. Writing is messy and it doesn’t always begin with writing. I always say that my writing needs time to percolate, and my coffee-maker brain is a slow one sometimes. It’s funny that doing the dishes or driving can be a legitimate part of a writing process, but it is. And so is a phone call to my mom, who often just listens to me talk through what I want to write about.
6. Sometimes, I need my Gail (or in my case, my Gilly). My Gail brings me back down from moments of panic, tells me to get started and getting going. I’d call her a cheerleader, but she’s much more than that. She’s my road trip buddy; when I drive down that highway of writing something big or difficult, she talks to me, keeps me awake, and keeps me going. At the end, I just wish we could give away the free car we drove to get there.
7. Writing should be fun and exciting! I struggled over how to write this for awhile, and then I finally decided that I was going to do what I tell my students to, to pick something I am really interested in and something fun and just go with it. One of the best argument papers I’ve read from an undergraduate was about which is better, French fries or tater tots.
8. And, finally, this teacher will always read your work with excitement and enthusiasm, waiting to see just how far you can go in your journey as a writer, and hoping to help get you there along the way. Because writing well may be tough, but it is always worth the effort.

So, in the end, maybe I’m not willing to start my own network or even to offer a life class; and this list is by no means exhaustive. But many years of being a student and a teacher has taught me a thing or two that I can pass along to my students, and the thing I really love about teaching is that I can always learn more and do better!

This morning, as I greeted a new batch of ninth graders into my first block English class, I knew I wasn’t the only one with transition on the mind. I’m sure it was a shock to all of us to hear that alarm clock ring so early in the morning, officially transitioning us out of our summer slumber to face the realities of a school schedule once again. But for the 24 fourteen year olds staring back at me, the transition from middle school into high school loomed even larger. What would the classes be like? How much homework would there be? Did I really plan on grading their summer assignments? Would they be able to turn assignments in late? How did their teachers expect them to behave? Would they get lost in the massive high school building? How much would their high school grades impact their future opportunities? Were they ready for this?

“Readiness” is an interesting concept. And despite six years of teaching high school English and a background in education policy in an environment where “readiness” is a common buzzword in the conversation around the high school to college transition, I have to wonder what it really means. What do I expect of incoming high school students? What should I expect?

I watched my students write for seven minutes to the first prompt they would ever receive in high school—“Tell me what’s on your mind right now”—knowing some would struggle with its ambiguity, while others would thrive on the freedom it offered. The boy on the front row wrote only one sentence in those seven minutes: “The day before yesterday, I had gone to the pool with my friends.” One of his peers was onto the second page of her freewrite before I told them they could put their pencils down. As their teacher, was I to assume that one was more ready than the other? She certainly had the fluency and the stamina to record her thoughts, while his response certainly did not meet my expectations for an honors-level ninth grade writer.

But in a subsequent component of the assignment, I learned that the boy knew a lot about writing, and more importantly, his own writing, after all. When asked to write down three things I should know about them as a student, this boy’s third item struck me as a better indicator of his “readiness” than the diagnostic writing piece he had just written. He simply wrote, “I enjoy reading and writing. Though I have trouble deciding on a topic.” Next to some of his classmates’ responses (“I have a Yorkshire Terrier whose name is Lexi” or “My favorite color is pink”), this boy’s response was reflective, aware, and metacognitive. He was—and is—ready. Maybe not ready to write a page about his feelings in the first fifteen minutes of high school, or ready to compose a two page analytical essay about Antigone, but certainly ready to learn. Ready to think about his writing process. Ready to engage.

And I am ready to teach him.

Whether we are working with students transitioning from elementary to middle school, middle to high school, or high school to college, it is important to remember that their preparation is not always evidenced by the clean cut diagnostic exams or writing assignments we ask them to perform. As their first point of contact in the transition to writing in middle school to writing in high school, I need to remember that I am not there to assess their “readiness,” or worse, the efficacy of their prior teachers in teaching them what they are supposed to know and be able to do by now, but rather to engage them in the recursive process of developing themselves as writers. I hope that, in four years, their first year college writing professors will do the same.

This is why I am so thrilled and honored to have been invited to participate in this year’s Transitioning to Writing Symposium. I look forward to collaborating with practitioners on both sides of the high school to college transition as we draw from our own experiences to shape the conversation. Ultimately, it is my hope that we can together create an environment that honors the experiences and knowledge that our students bring into our classes on the first day of school as we move them toward the next inevitable transition that they will encounter.

Two decades ago, my mentor, Sherrie Gradin, made the comment in English 617: Teaching College English that she wished teachers would stop referring to the process of writing as THE Writing Process, as if there were one magical process that would enable all students to write amazing essays.  What Sherrie wanted us to think about was that everyone has his or her process for writing and that the teacher should encourage students to incorporate various strategies into their own writing process.  Our conversation then turned toward the power of listening to our students and our asking them to think reflectively about what they needed in their own processing.

This past year, I’ve spent a huge amount of my time processing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and thinking about how this framework will change writing instruction in the K-12 classroom.  For the first time in my 20 years of experience with public education, teachers are given time to process a new framework several years before the assessment begins.  Teachers are allowed to explore, to develop, to think about how best to incorporate this new framework into their classroom instruction.  Much of my job has been to help teachers think through that process.  This CCSS standards for writing encourages teachers to reflect on their own writing process and subsequent writing instruction.  This implementation underscores that there is no one process because are all teachers at different levels with diverse backgrounds and even more varied classrooms.

Last year was our first Transitioning to Writing Symposium.  In planning for the event, we the planning team needed to go through a process of determining what was important to share and what we wanted to achieve in those two days.  We heard from teachers, instructors, and students.  We shared strategies with each other and began the conversation.   What we discovered was that we all are searching for ways to prepare our students for their futures. We came away from that weekend for shared conversation thinking about what we needed to do for our own classroom instruction.  Even now, we the planning team find ourselves processing the feedback from last year and talking about what we want to offer for the second Transitioning to Writing Conference.  What we know is that we still need to continue the dialogue with the teachers and instructors in the high school, community college, and college classrooms.  Process takes time and revision.

As we move closer to the end of September and toward the second Transitioning to College Writing Symposium, I find myself excited to be a part of this process of talking, sharing, thinking, and learning.   Because of the CCSS, writing instruction will shift, and teachers already are searching for strategies.  I want to listen for the multiple processes that other teachers use in their classrooms.  Ultimately, I look forward to watching what evolves from the second symposium and finding out where we go from there.

We all love to tell stories. In fact, when we come together for the Transitioning to College Writing symposium, we are going to share many stories from our classrooms. These stories will range from frustration to joy, and everywhere in between, for we’ve all chosen a profession that’s as rewarding as it is taxing. The stories we share with one another at the conference will enable us to better understand the struggles and successes some participants are experiencing, as well as help to establish a healthy ethos amongst us as we develop common ground as concerned educators.

A narrative is a story, and narratives have long been taught to students as personal writing, a way to express their thoughts and feelings on a particular experience. But I believe we are missing a great opportunity for our students. Narratives should be approached as rhetorical devices, and like any rhetorical device, we should teach our students to use narratives well when it’s appropriate. As I mentioned earlier, narratives are a great way to establish ethos with an audience, while also maintaining audience interest. Readers want to be informed, but they also want to be able to relate to the topic. When a student can relate an issue they are researching to their own personal experience, and do so formally, they are building a bridge to the audience. This bridge enables the student to create ethos while also illustrating a deep understanding of the complexity of an issue they’ve researched – specifically how it affects others in the real world.

For these reasons, I’ve always encouraged my students to provide a brief narrative in the majority of their writing. A well-executed narrative, along with insightful and thorough research on an issue, can produce a paper well-balanced with logos and pathos, thus creating a sustained and credible ethos. The problem is most students tend to think of narratives as passive and personal. But with the proper instruction and practice, we can enable our students to become skillful users of narrative, using it to persuade and relate to an audience in a powerful and compelling way.

I look forward to discussing this idea with you more at the conference this September.

Keith Boran

This week I’ve been reminded of why I love what I do. I talk to students all day about their struggles with writing. This week, I talked to a high school student who’s old enough to be a sophomore but is still categorized as a freshman. With his creativity and quiet curiosity, this kid has stolen the hearts of my family and my in-laws. With his determination and running talent he’s made the high school sports column of the local paper numerous times, even though he’s been running for only one year. Right now, he’s probably the second fastest kid in the state. Unfortunately, this fellow is also severely dyslexic, and too many folks have written him off. His running was in jeopardy this year because of his low grades, but he and I are working now to make sure he doesn’t have to worry about that again. Yesterday, he told me that biology, not English, was his biggest obstacle of the day, so I—an English teacher—proceeded to help him with chemistry, which apparently is now also taught in biology. Together we managed to work out some complicated compounds, and by the end of his worksheet, we both felt like we’d conquered chemistry. My first thought for this post was of how starved some of our students are for us just to answer their questions. This fellow’s parents are absent, and his extended family is incapable of helping him academically, though they are very supportive of him receiving help. He won’t ask questions in his classes because he’s embarrassed by his struggles to understand. Earlier this week, he asked me how to spell “dirt,” a question he’d never ask his classroom teacher. One-on-one, however, he has more questions outside of his homework than we can answer in an hour. My second thought was of the connectivity of the organizations behind the scenes in this fellow’s life. He’s a high school student whose cross country coach has him working with a community college writing center director who wants to send him to a university where he can run competitively and make it to the Olympic trials. He’s good enough to make the cut by the time he’s running in college. I wanted to emphasize the importance of our goal for this symposium of working together to prepare our students. We’re all on the same team when we’re helping this fellow and other students like him succeed with their goals. My final thought was of how much I want my WC consultants to feel the struggle and the triumph when they work with students that my high school runner and I felt when we conquered chemistry together.

I recently reviewed a book called Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy by Jason Palmeri. Among other things, the book made me think about what “multimodal” actually means, why it matters to teaching writing, and what we’re supposed to do with it moving forward.

One of the most important things I took away from it is that multimodal composition isn’t new. In fact, the idea of integrated non-alphabetic approaches to literacy in the composition classroom goes back several decades. What we are now exploring with digital video cameras and podcasts, our colleagues in the 1970s were exploring with Xerox machines, collages, and photographs. The core idea is the same: if our goal is to teach students to communicate and think critically, we should be using all the tools in the toolbox. Palmeri suggests that it is very narrow-minded of us to think of ourselves only as “writing” teachers. We are, in fact, teachers of composition, and that’s the process for which we are experts.

So where should we go from here? We certainly shouldn’t stop teaching writing. We aren’t so far advanced that writing is no longer the privileged form of discourse: it certainly still is. However, we should strive to open new avenues of process and expression for our students. Though a formal alphabetic composition may be most appropriate for some contexts, it isn’t for others, and we should not stifle students’ whose own rhetorical situation pushes them in a different direction. At the very least, we should encourage and nourish multimodality as a process for composition. Even if we want our students to be producing traditional written compositions as the end-goal, who’s to say that their process has to be likewise alphabetic? Technology affords our students new ways to enter into the conversation, whether that’s through dynamic digital mind-mapping (through something like Prezi) in the brainstorming process, or audio-recorded drafting, these “ways in” can ultimately help some students build confidence in expression that they would not ordinarily get from following our conventional “writing process.”

I’ll finish with a short video that Guy Krueger and I assembled at the Digital Media and Composition Institute at Ohio State this summer. In this video, Dr. Cynthia Selfe talks about why multimodality matters: to our students, to us, and to the larger enterprise of composition. One thing stands out to me: we should be encouraging our students to explore all available means of persuasion. Whether those means are a Xeroxed collage of images, a series of mini-podcasts, or an MLA-style essay, we need to keep our eyes on the fundamental rhetorical aim of our discipline.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TqLEl37CtQ]

Next Monday, 8 a.m., is my favorite teaching moment of the year, the first class on the first day of college for my students.  They shine with bright expectations of the adventure ahead.  This year I will shine, too, with expectations of how I can help them see themselves not just as students, but as writers.  I started thinking about that transition in my study of the Common Core Standards this summer.  A phrase from the introduction to the Common Core really resounded with me.  The sentence read,  “They [college and career ready students] respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose, and discipline.”  That’s a description of a writer.  That’s what I want my students to become.

Later in the summer, as I was assessing first-year ePortfolios, I read reflections that sounded like writers reflecting on their writing.  The writers talked about responding to different audiences and purposes.  They used words like “context” and “strategies.”   But I also read reflections that sounded like students reflecting on their coursework.  They talked about projects and grades and used phrases from the classroom, like “the instructions were” and “the instructor said to.”  As I thought about those ePortfolios, I was reminded that one of my primary tasks is to help those students, from the very first day of college, cross that bridge from being a student who writes to being a writer who writes.

So that’s my goal for this year, and I’m using the picture above of architect Philip Johnson’s glass house as inspiration.  Rather than feeling walled off inside the red brick walls of their classroom and their campus, my students should feel open to the real world, composing not just as students finishing an assignment for a class, but as writers writing to real readers.  I’ll let you know how the work is progressing when I see you at Transitioning in September.