Taking The Writing Process Outside

By Author: Monna Kjos Almenningen
Total Articles: 2
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Taking the writing process outside the English curriculum has helped me bump the required ten-page research paper up a notch by cultivating those three foundational elements of meaningful assignments: choice, genre, and audience. National History Day addresses all three of those elements. Under the umbrella of a broad yearly theme (e.g., Communication in History, Triumph Cartier Replica and Tragedy in History), students select a topic and conduct research in both primary and secondary sources. This research can then be presented in one of four ways: a traditional research paper, a performance, a documentary, or an exhibit. Recently, the competition added a fifth category of Web page design, which is gradually being implemented by individual states. Students may work in groups of up to five with the exception of the paper category, which remains an individual endeavor. Contest themes, rules, and support materials are available online .

I came to National History Day through the back door. I learned of the program when I was asked to judge at the national ...
... competition because of my title and position as an education specialist for elementary and middle school programs at the National Archives. In my mid-20s, it was a heady job that made me play the role of expert and gave me ample room for creativity and learning. I was writing articles for publication about teaching with documents and presenting at national conferences such as the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Middle School Association. I was not prepared, however, for the level of student work I encountered as a National History Day judge. The experience was an educational gauntlet thrown down to challenge me as a professional, rooting me out of the federal sinecure and sending me back to the classroom where the real work gets done. After judging NHD, I felt like a sham of an education specialist because I had never created an environment in my classroom where students could learn, take ownership, and present to a wider audience like the History Day students I judged had. I felt compelled to find a way back into the schools to redouble my efforts at teaching.

In my twelve or so years of coaching NHD, sometimes through a classroom paper requirement, other times as an adviser to an after-school history club, I have seen students do amazing things. They have performed original research in historical societies and archives, arranged for powerful interviews with pundits and professors, and screened a documentary for an audience of academics that left the room stunned for a full 60 seconds before they burst into applause. I have worked with special-needs seventh-grade students in the District of Columbia to arrange a telephone interview with Gordon Hi-rabayashi, a famous resister of Japanese internment. I traveled with four eighth-grade students to the Massachusetts Historical Breitling Airwolf Replica Watches Society where they held a jar of tea leaves that had been scraped up from the shoreline on the morning after the famous tea party. I drove four New Hampshire students to the Hip-Hop Archives at the W.E.B. Dubois Center at Harvard University. There they interviewed a cultural anthropologist for their documentary on the evolution and influence of African American music. The next year, that same group scored an interview with the head of the Kennedy School of Government for their research on Aljazeera.