Why Teach Approaches To Workplace And Community Writing?

By Author: FIRELEAVES
Total Articles: 49
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Each of us had that "first job." For the three of us, it was bagging groceries at the local supermarket, shelving books at the city library, and serving Big Macs at the local McDonald's. For each of these jobs, we had to fill out job applications, request work permits signed by school guidance counselors and teachers, participate in workplace orientations, negotiate with managers over schedules, find our way through the mounds of paperwork supplied by human Tag Heuer Replica resources—all in search of a first paycheck. When we look at students today, particularly those in high school and college classrooms, the pursuit of the first paycheck is still enticing and persuasive. In fact, many of these students have already experienced multiple jobs and worksites. Much like we did, they negotiate the complexities of paperwork, unfamiliar forms, new communication expectations, and inevitably new kinds of writing. These workplace experiences compete with academic experiences, and often we hear complaints about how their academic classes and the writing that they do ...
... in English class don't seem relevant in the "real world" of work.

In recent years, colleges and universities have started to respond to the requests of both students and employers by implementing writing courses on technical and professional communication. Technical and professional writing has become a well-re-searched area within composition and rhetoric. In our work with both in-service and preserves English language arts teachers, we often hear questions about how to make writing relevant to students and how to build writing skills for students that might extend beyond the classroom. We believe that community and workplace writing provides a place for making these kinds of connections for students, not only in college but also in high school settings. Here's why.

Schools equip students well for writing in school: writing individually, writing to be assessed on their knowledge of either content or writing itself, writing to make connections across fields of knowledge. But research on workplace writing tells us that there are salient features of this kind of writing that are rarely taken up in school, including the following:
1. Writing collaboratively
2. Writing for multiple audiences
3. Writing for multiple purposes
4. Writing for audiences that know less about the topic than does the writer
5. Writing that is meant to be not only read, but to be used to accomplish a task (Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Pare)

Writing in the community and workplace re-quires the writer to be rhetorically savvy to anticipate the needs, purposes, and responses of multiple readers; to learn how to write unfamiliar genres; to learn to write with others, who may be sitting next to you or sitting at a computer across the country. As the way we write changes in the world, so do writing processes and the ways that writers go about learning how to write in new situations.

Despite the wonderful, meaningful opportunities that workplace and community writing projects can create for students, many general English or writing classes don't touch on workplace genres at all. Often, we hear that there simply isn't time in the curriculum. But as our experiences with that first job Omega Replica Watches and the pursuit of that first paycheck tell us, students are usually interested in learning about workplace writing. Furthermore, we see this kind of writing, coupled with rhetorically based writing instruction, as a way to teach writing strategies that students can put to use across the curriculum and beyond the classroom walls. Simply put, we use workplace and community writing projects as the "carrot" to draw students of all levels into discussions and writing experiences that highlight audience, purpose, genre, and usability in ways that resonate with them in their daily lives. We know our students, and for many of them, writing remains a place of struggle, boredom, and disconnect. Through projects such as the one outlined below and other workplace writing curricula that we have developed, our goal is to provide students with real-world documents, readers, and writers and to lead them into critical conversation and analysis about these kinds of texts, how they are used by their readers, and how they meet the intentions of their writers.