Rationale+and+research

=Rationale and Research=

Context is extremely important when writing analytically. It is the backbone of good writing and very difficult to teach. Its intricacies and vast forms are hard to pin down. Context ends up being everything, but the trick is knowing when it’s too much or too little. That line is fuzzy. It also can be given in small bites, big chunks, subtleties, nuances, quotes, etc. It can look hundreds of ways and each one can be appropriate – or not. Kids are growing up in a world where things being out of context or simplified (to such an extreme they aren’t actually accurate) is the norm. And kids aren’t the only prey to this. Think about how many adults you know that embrace ideas and “facts” taken so far out of context that they only have a whiff of truth about them.

Seldom are students able to ferret out context and subtext or use it when writing, without a great amount of support. We tell them it’s from the Victorian Era or the Modern Era. We give them fun activities to make it stick – a web quest, staging a scene, anything with markers and big sheets of butcher paper. Then they don’t refer to that information at all when they write. They pull random quotes to use in an analysis that are out of context. Other times they pull a quote that fits, but they narrow it far too much and fail to mention key ideas, such as who said it. Or perhaps they copy 20 lines of text from a novel, when they only need a 3 word phase. They write an argument, but provide no context to make the reader care about it. They don’t naturally understand the importance of context. No matter how engaging we seem to be when teaching context and its importance, it simply slips from their little noggins when they really need to use it and we’re not there.

As a believer that all writing is rhetorical in nature, I have always impressed on my students that a text is a whole body designed to change those who come into contact with it. It is an airtight construction and the removal of one piece could make the structure fall and the effect lost. I use a car as an analogy. A car can still run if it has no doors, but it isn’t very comfortable to ride in. It’s incomplete and uncomfortable. It can look pristine and have no engine. So it has all the bells and whistles, but it won’t run. And so on and so forth. They tend to understand this with a narrative or story. They can see it’s incomplete and they can figure out how to make it more like a story. They can describe more things, add in dialogue, etc. They have context and schema for this. But an analysis is a different story. They don’t have the context to see it as a functioning working whole. Teachers, since it is such a difficult concept for kids to wrap their heads around, simplify it or create the structure for them. The topic sentence is the first sentence of each of the 3 body paragraphs. We’ll all use the same thesis sentence. Use a quote, then a sentence explaining it. And so on and so forth. It becomes parts then. Parts the teacher has fit together and dictated. When it comes to analytical writing, creativity withers away and students, in no way, embrace that type of writing.

The brain responds to anything that triggers emotion or is novel. Therein lies the problem, students don't have an emotional response to an analytical text unless it has a visual element or uses emotional appeals and is quite short – like Tweets, Facebook posts, etc. They have an even harder time creating context when they have no ownership or sense of purpose/audience in their reading or writing. With the new standards and tests, ownership and creativity will be even harder to foster in a small air tight box.

Louis Rosenblatt broke ground with her reader-response theories. Allowing students to respond to a text and learn to appreciate and understand it through their relationship to it, has been a key in the teaching of literature. It has always been a sound way to approach it. We find ways to make the content appealing and the writing as personal as possible so they’ll actually have a response. Students have had so few experiences with analytical text; they simply have no response or relationship with it. Reading analytically has been reserved for reading fiction. Rosenblatt's ideas need to be applied to analytical writing now. They shut down as soon as they see all the words and their brain says “Oh, this is boring.” Or they create a connection that isn’t rational or appropriate and run with that. They aren’t familiar enough with the codes of language to pick up on clues with much success. This movement to analytical writing has potential to be a great step backwards.

When I initially became a trainer and read Peter Elbow’s work, it was a game changer. Let them write first. Just let them, with no judgment and no constraints. I applied it in class and it worked so well I continued. With TAKS we could rationally focus on personal writing. I could spend as much time as I liked working through a memoir because it was THE writing assignment. Kids were willing to write for me since I could start with what they knew - themselves. Much of the transfer to analytical work began with my AP classes, and then trickled down to Academic classes to help with college prep. I had all the time in the world to explore and let them work at their own pace. We started with personal and moved to analytical. However, with the advent of STAAR and the writings we see attached to it, this is changing. Already my district is having teachers come up with a STAAR plan and the urgency of needing to pack too much in and hurry through curriculum has become palpable.

At the secondary level, we have kids coming in who’ve missed the boat or gotten on the wrong boat and sailed it all the way down the river. They have some bad habits that are pretty well cemented. But STAAR is here. So, we need to teach them high level analysis and critical reading skills, as well as critical writing skills and effective revision skills. By 11th grade they’ll need to be able to rattle off a diction analysis on a Hemingway short story in a small box; that is daunting, to say the least. By 8th grade there is little personal to focus on, according to state standards; students need to be able to analyze and respond to a prompt clearly. By 9th grade it would be difficult to convince an administrator that you need a few months of freedom to allow students to develop a love of writing and reading before you try to go deeper. By 9th grade, they aren’t writing about themselves anymore and they have 5 tests looming over them. There is no longer a perceived need to begin with the personal. I don’t see things relaxing anytime soon. The state says they are asking kids to be creative, just in a rather cramped space. There is panic and gnashing of teeth. And here we all are.

Another layer is that kids are growing up in an age where everything comes at them quite fast. Slowing down to read, much less analyze seems ridiculous to them; they can get anything they need with a few clicks. Why read a book when you can get on the Internet? Information comes to you in images, with sound, and in small bites that are immediate. A Twitter feed gives you vast and varied info that you can read and react to in seconds. So, when a teacher suggests a student sit and read, it seems preposterous. Why go 20 mph in a 70 mph zone? Since they don’t read, their writing suffers as well. But again, why write a whole paper, when most of the information you seek comes to you in bits. Even CNN has a feed to let you in on the news by just scanning the bottom of your computer screen. No need to even stop and watch a news segment that might actually last 3 or 4 minutes. That’s how we process info, so that’s how we give it back. In small disconnected chunks.

What furthers aggravates the issue is the inability to be emotionally involved in anything that has a grade attached to it. We get them all jazzed up and then have to put a C on it because of the rubric. //Your excitement and passion = average kids//. Grades aren’t really negotiable in many school districts, so, as Daniel Pink so wonderfully illuminates for us in //Drive//, attempting to motivate in a system that is designed to destroy motivation is tricky – to say the least. The new battery of tests will only raise the stakes and make this even harder.

By using mediums that are complex and dependent on context, but visual, critical thinking can be fostered and allowed to grow. I worked with trailers that had been retooled in a different genre in order to teach mood and how that changes, but the more important issue here is that they take scenes out of context. Taking them out of context is what makes them funny, clever even. I also got it into my head after the last show I saw at the contemporary Art museum that I wanted to use abstract art and graffiti somewhere in the classroom. Again, the issue of context came up. Without the context, it’s very difficult to appreciate the art. I realized when getting all excited talking to folks about art, they were solely tolerating me. They had no context to use. Then I watched a TED talk by Richard Seymour called “How Beauty Feels” and I knew what to do. He argues that context is what makes something beautiful and moving. So, I decided to focus on context and how all things are derived from it.

We need to find ways to support critical thinking, reading, and writing without dumbing it down, putting them in a box, or shutting them up. It has to be effective and it has to be started day 1. So, what do we do? Well, schema theory tells us the best place to start is with what they know. And we do that. Many times photography, film, advertisements, etc. are used as a way into literature – a hook. Look isn’t this cool! Now, we’ll do the hard stuff. However, using the //Simpsons// as an introduction, then hopping into a rhetorical analysis of Jonathan Swift is non sequitor. The kids can’t move from the visual medium to text easily. They are different mediums that require different skills. Kids get excited and eager for more with the visual, then walloped with a big stick when they run into all of that text. Sometimes the visual is actually used as the literature. Perhaps students learn about color symbolism and euphemisms through an advertisement. Perhaps they analyze the lyrics to their favorite song, and then use the skills to analyze a classical poem afterwards. It helps with reading and analysis, but what about analytical writing? Sometimes photography or paintings are used to help them understand a time period or a mood. And it’s effective. Again, using the same critical skills when writing, unfortunately, doesn’t transfer and stick. Writing analytically is almost disconnected from reading analytically. More and more I see that students feel their ideas are disconnected from what the teacher wants. And analytical writing is driven by the teacher, seldom the student.

David Ausubel’s words have always resonated with me. His claim that the “most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows” has been my mantra. Schema theory has been accepted and used by teachers for many years to help with reading comprehension, but it isn’t necessarily applied to writing skills. Maybe content or creative works like poetry and fiction, but not usually for analytical writing. A perspective study conducted in the 70s is what caused me to consider using this for writing instruction, mainly revision. The study consisted of 2 groups of readers that were asked to assume different points of view while reading a passage describing a house (Pichert & Anderson, 1977). The recall of information and what they focused on as readers was dependent on their roles; burglar or homebuyer. The details they could still recall afterwards were triggered by the role they play. Students don’t naturally assume roles when they read their own work. At times, they assume the teacher role when they peer edit. But it isn’t natural to them and they only have a teacher designed schema for revision. We give them the vocabulary and the schema for writing – they don’t come by it through what they know. They don't know their role when reading something analytical. They tend to copy what you do without internalizing it. From what we know about reading, readers who encounter texts that are culturally unfamiliar to them, struggle with comprehension of them. When this happens, distortions easily surface when they attempt to impose their schema on the unfamiliar text. An analytical paper is culturally unfamiliar to many students. It may be relatively familiar in a 5 paragraph format, but the 5 paragraph essay doesn’t exist in nature, only in the zoo-like confines of the classroom. When loosed on a peer’s work, teachers tend to provide a very structured teacher-driven approach, because the schema simply isn’t there. So, we naturally simplify the process and break it into bite sized chunks. We’re scaffolding, but, when we aren’t there, how will they think critically and independently? We are actually giving them a skill set taken out of context.

I’ve had success in showing students the importance of context on many many levels in writing. It finally occurred to be the revision problem was truly a reading comprehension issue on many levels, not a lack of understanding how to use language. By veering away from structured revision and writing instruction at the beginning of the process and, instead, beginning with the whole purpose and function of context, students begin to establish the big picture, and then move to the details. The emphasis is to build their questioning strategies since asking the right question is the key to analytical thinking, reading and writing. If you know the questions to ask, the rest falls in place.