Friday Fragments
5 years ago
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Teaching Paragraphs to Developmental Writers
I have taught developmental/basic writing at two community colleges. At both campuses the aim of the course was to help students develop the necessary skills to write a rhetorically effective essay. Each school, or at least the texts they required for the course, focused on paragraph development as the preliminary building blocks to academic writing. Not every colleague that I've conversed with agrees with the paragraph-first approach and I take this opportunity to invite all those opposed to please comment.
One fault that I have found with my current teaching of paragraphs is the text. At the moment I am using Real Writing: With Readings by Susan Anker and prior to this semester I was using Mosaics: Focusing on Paragraphs in Context by Kim Flachmann. While I have found both of these books helpful as an instructors resource, they do leave a great deal to be desired as a resource for students. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that all Basic English texts, to my knowledge, are static and leave little room for student mobility and manipulation. The problem isn't with what they say, but with what they don't say. I think we would all agree that no two schools share the same demographic. So what would lead us to believe that the basic writing needs of these students could possibly be viewed through a similar lens? (Oh boy, here I go.)
What I propose we try to accomplish with this section of the blog, is to accumulate as many lessons on paragraph writing as we can. Both of the texts I had mentioned earlier provide information for nine paragraph styles. I will create a label for each of these styles and any lesson you would like to submit will receive it's own post. Each post will be available for comments and then be categorized under its appropriate tag. What this will do is provide a bank of lessons, as diverse as our students, that will then be available to any educator or student who needs them. I suspect that this may be very helpful for instructors new to teaching Developmental/Basic Writing. Heavens knows I could have used it.
Kelly
One fault that I have found with my current teaching of paragraphs is the text. At the moment I am using Real Writing: With Readings by Susan Anker and prior to this semester I was using Mosaics: Focusing on Paragraphs in Context by Kim Flachmann. While I have found both of these books helpful as an instructors resource, they do leave a great deal to be desired as a resource for students. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that all Basic English texts, to my knowledge, are static and leave little room for student mobility and manipulation. The problem isn't with what they say, but with what they don't say. I think we would all agree that no two schools share the same demographic. So what would lead us to believe that the basic writing needs of these students could possibly be viewed through a similar lens? (Oh boy, here I go.)
What I propose we try to accomplish with this section of the blog, is to accumulate as many lessons on paragraph writing as we can. Both of the texts I had mentioned earlier provide information for nine paragraph styles. I will create a label for each of these styles and any lesson you would like to submit will receive it's own post. Each post will be available for comments and then be categorized under its appropriate tag. What this will do is provide a bank of lessons, as diverse as our students, that will then be available to any educator or student who needs them. I suspect that this may be very helpful for instructors new to teaching Developmental/Basic Writing. Heavens knows I could have used it.
Kelly
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
