Week2: Difficulties of teaching writing

What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing, and how do you go about teaching that?

As I read through Lisa Ede's and Andrea Lunsford's "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy" I conjured a mental image of the writer as a sorcerer magically invoking an audience. Though quite fantastical and over-dramatized, this is what I try to teach my students to do with their writing -- create magic. We discuss critical thinking and critical engagement in composition and ESL theory courses. We debate how or whether we can teach critical thinking. In leadership training courses, we are likely to be asked to recall an "aha moment", that moment when we reached a realization or a moment of enlightenment. My job as an instructor is to critically engage my students. Instructor reviews are one way I measure how I'm doing in my teaching and whether I've found ways of engaging my students in didactic learning rather than merely speaking at them for several hours per week. My students are my audience for whom I prepare weekly presentations where I aim to critically engage them in discussion and thought. Statistically speaking, no one enrolls in intro-level composition because he/she wants to. I poll my students at the start of the term -- Who is really excited about this course? Who just loves English classes? Who is taking this class because they want to? Who is taking this class because it's required? One or two students in each section tell me they love English classes, though all admit they're taking the course because it's required. We all have a good laugh realizing student motivation is similar for all in introductory composition as it's extrinsically rather than intrinsically produced.

I don't love English myself. It's difficult to learn -- especially for native speakers who must deconstruct all their knowledge of a language they own, then reconstruct it within rule-sets and value-sets they've not been taught the past 18+ years. ESL learners have the advantage of learning the language within the higher academic context where the rules confine how we compose. One of the most difficult things to teach my ESL students is to immerse themselves with native speakers so they learn the language in its context. I wonder whether this gives them real language skills needed to compose, as we still hold a great distinction between the aural and visual audience as Walter Ong implied. The language of academic composition exists somewhat in a vacuum -- It's neither completely real, nor completely fake, as is the audience Ong says really does not exist.

Social media presents opportunities to observe instances of audience addressed versus audience invoked, real audiences confused with fake. In a few social media platforms (where I consider myself highly engaged) I pass reading titles that don't invoke me:

"Things you've been doing wrong...," are value judgments written by authors who don't know me.

"This girl writes a letter to the President. You won't believe what happens next," overlooks the likelihood the reader can predict the outcome.

These headlines don't seek to invoke the audience, but rather they talk at the audience, attribute values to assumed audience, and in my case, alienate the audience. Sometimes these headlines infuriate me because the author seems oblivious of his audience and gives me no reason to care as a reader, thus no reason to critically engage. Thomas Kuhn observed language as paradigmatic, non-static. My job as a teacher is to appreciate and understand real world changes and to make the work we do in composition courses relevant, meaningful, and engaging beyond the classroom -- whether in other courses or outside the institution. There are two aspects to making this teaching successful: My ability to critically engage my student audience, and to foster or coach them to care about reaching out to engage an audience real or perceived. In order for these things to happen, I must care about my students' success and create an environment in which they learn to care about their writing. I must present them with a real audience, an understanding and appreciation of their responsibility to invoke, engage, and manipulate said audience. I must also understand that they are my audience to whom I have a responsibility of engaging. In short, the most difficult thing to teach students is why they should care about their writing. The most difficult thing to teach myself is remaining in touch with what is important to them so that I might make content relevant and interesting, providing content meaningful and an environment safe for developing voices.