Responding To The "real World"

By Author: Friendhdx
Total Articles: 47
Comment this article

Kubek's letter caused great uproar among students at Affiliated Alternatives. Paper in hand, three students burst into Bob Schaefer's third-hour English class the day of the letter's printing with lots to say. Some students wanted to seek revenge by confronting Kubek personally. Others remarked Links Of London Charms at how contradictory the letter was, saying, "Aren't we taking responsibility by staying in school?"

Kubek's letter, in presenting a "real world" context for writing and responding, ultimately urged Affiliated Alternatives students to talk back to the ways in which they, as teen mothers and students, were characterized in Kubek's letter to the editor. Over the course of the two days following the appearance of the letter to the editor, Schaefer disrupted the current unit he and his students were involved in to assist the students in drafting a letter to the editor. Writing a letter to the editor was not a lesson that was "planned" by Schaefer. Instead, it arose as an important site for learning within Affiliated Alternatives' English curriculum. ...
... Schaefer embraced this authentic writing activity and prompted students to write a letter to the editor.1 As a participant-observer at Affiliated Alternatives for a year and a half, I had the opportunity to become familiar with Schaefer's curricular choices and, throughout this article, have chosen to highlight this particular writing activity's potential for authentic learning. In witnessing the ways that Affiliated Alternatives students responded to the call to write for a concrete and meaningful purpose, I became privy to the power of authentic writing instruction with "at risk" teens.

Connecting Authentic Writing Instruction to Principles of Dialogism

During Affiliated Alternatives students' process of writing a letter to the editor in response to Kubek, several questions entered my mind concerning students' production of authentic text. Though I had seen students write book talks and respond to literature they had read for class with analyses of characters, I was particularly interested in how writing a letter to the editor captured the attention of Affiliated Alternatives students in ways that other writing activities had not. I began to articulate my questions as the following:

1. What made Affiliated Alternatives students' letter writing an authentic writing activity?
2. In what ways did Affiliated Alternatives students' authentic writing respond to their status as teen mothers and adolescents?
3. How can educators harness the power of this particular writing activity in ways to bring it forward into future writing instruction?
4. To approach my questions, I began to define what I meant by the term authentic. In thinking about this, I recognized the importance and relevance of two theoretical terms, dialogic and dialogism, and these terms helped me better understand why writing a letter to the editor was indeed evidence of what I was calling authentic writing. The two terms, dialogic and dialogism, attributed to Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, articulate the philosophy that utterances (distinct pieces of spoken or written text) always respond to and anticipate other utterances. Dialogism, then, as a theory, is primarily concerned with the idea that all language is produced as response to other language. Thus, a central tenet of viewing text as dialogic highlights the "action" utterances one text makes in relation to other texts. I knew that Links Of London Bracelets viewing all text as participating in "action" with other texts would assist me in understanding part of what made this particular writing activity authentic to Affiliated Alternatives students. I also recognized that viewing all text, whether spoken or written, as purposeful—that is, all text works to respond to something, and therefore works to make meaning—was key in understanding the power of writing a letter to the editor. Since the purpose of such an activity was highly motivating to Affiliated Alternatives students, I was able to see that writing text that was purposeful and meaningful, as well as in dialogue with other texts, was at the core of the meaning of authentic writing.