Professional Writing in the SCWriP Summer Institute 2007
By: Sheridan Blau
Date: July 10, 2007
Summary: Sheridan Blau, director of the South Coast Writing Project at the University of California in Santa Barbara, gives new summer institute participants the following piece, which examines the genres and purposes for professional writing in the institute.
SUMMER Fellows at the South Coast Writing Project ( SCWriP) in Santa Barbara, California, receive the following as part of the information about their opportunities for writing in the summer institute.
For the past several years SCWriP Summer Institutes have focused with particular intensity on the challenges of teaching academic writing and preparing a broader segment of the school population for the demands of writing in college and on college entrance and placement tests. As a way of exploring the demands of such writing and preparing ourselves better to teach it, we have also decided to experiment ourselves during the summer with at least one piece of writing that would be for us what academic writing is or ought to be for our students. That means committing ourselves individually and collectively to working on one piece of writing that in our particular academic context can be most appropriately labeled “professional writing.”
Thus we ask all Fellows to come to the first week of the Summer Institute (and most especially to the first meeting of their writing group) with some piece of professional writing in progress that they have begun and to which they have enough commitment to see through the process of refinement and revision with an aim toward publication within or beyond the Institute. This will not be seen as an especially daunting task, once we clarify what we mean by “professional” writing, what sorts of forms and formats it might include, and what must be done to show up on the first day of the Institute with a draft in progress.
What Is Professional Writing and What Might It Look Like?
By “professional writing” we mean to designate all the various forms and topics of writing that a teacher might engage in from his or her perspective as a professional educator. This would include in a SCWriP Summer Institute at least the following types and topics for writing.
1. Short articles. A natural article for a Summer Institute Fellow to write would be an account of the practice he or she will be demonstrating during the institute. Every participant gives a demonstration and every one could write a brief article based on the presentation, including some rationale or account of how this practice emerged as part of the teacher’s repertoire, what the practice entails, and what sort of work (with student samples) it elicits from students. Such thinking about one’s demonstration is necessary anyway in preparing for and rehearsing an anticipated presentation.
Other models for articles about teaching practices can be found in the yearly volumes put out by NCTE in the Classroom Practices series. Each of these volumes is a collection of short articles (2–3 pages) by classroom teachers describing a favorite lesson or approach to teaching a particular subject or topic. Longer articles describing teaching practices regularly appear in English Journal, California English, and similar professional journals.
An article in progress at the beginning of the institute might consist of an outline of the demonstration lesson and a couple of draft paragraphs reflecting on the significance of the lesson or telling the story of its origins. The finished article could then be submitted to a regional or national journal or for publication in an NCTE Classroom Practices volume or in NCTE’s Notes Plus, a quarterly collection of very short articles describing classroom practices. Or it could be published in SCWriP’s own journal PostSCWriP, where it would be especially welcome. The short article form might also be used for a review of a professional book, a response to a journal article, or a report on some curricular change or innovative program in the classroom.
2. Position papers. Such a paper differs from what we are calling an article in that it takes on an issue—often a controversial one—and serves more to present an argument or make a case than to add to the reservoir of professional knowledge where no contribution competes with any other. A position paper may take the form of an editorial or opinion essay or it might be framed as a proposal for a curricular change or reform of academic policy. It can be addressed to knowledgeable colleagues or to the general public or to educational policymakers. Many professional leaders in the English language arts have called upon teachers in recent years to write op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, and similar essays to provide legislators and the public at large with the perspective and wisdom of teaching professionals on sensitive educational issues that are generally being decided with little or no consultation with teachers. Policymakers in education and the public they serve need to hear the voices of experienced teachers on such matters as bilingual education, the best approaches to teaching reading, the role of standards, and consequential assessment programs. Position papers can be submitted for publication in newspapers and newsletters, delivered as testimony at hearings and school board meetings, and published by SCWriP in our quarterly Bulletin. They can also be distributed to members of a group through the mail or handed out at a meeting.
3. Teaching stories. Every teacher has stories to tell about teaching experiences that reveal important lessons about teaching and learning or illuminate educational problems and dilemmas. Teaching stories are widely recognized as contributions to our professional literature when they consist both of narrative or anecdote and reflection—of a “so what” that follows a “what.” Teaching stories are frequently found in professional journals like California English and the publications of other regional NCTE affiliates, and in professional newsletters and bulletins (including SCWriP publications), as well as in publications directed to the general public.
4. Case studies. Teachers interested in teacher-research often begin their work with case studies of problem students. Such studies frequently yield the most satisfying and useful sorts of information for teachers and the most interesting reports for other teachers to read. As research they have a distinguished history in the writing of Freud and other researchers in the human sciences, and they are especially attractive for writers and readers with literary interests because they are so much like fiction. A case study is often like a good short story with an interpretive mini-essay attached. That is, the study introduces a character and tells his story, showing his actions and thoughts and presenting the conflict of the learning problem or challenge to the teacher. Then it reflects on what the story reveals to the writer and what can be learned from it as a lesson for teaching. A variation of the case study of a particular student can be a case study of a teaching problem or event that can be recounted in the lively detail of a “thick description” and reflected upon as a “telling” or illuminating case. (In this instance a case study may be indistinguishable from what I have labeled above a “teacher story”). Case studies appear regularly in scholarly and professional journals.
5. Reflections/Meditations/Think Pieces. These forms of writing could just as easily be called articles or essays, but they probably deserve a category of their own to emphasize their exploratory and open-ended character. They may best represent the essay itself, however, insofar as the essay form and name originated with Montaigne’s Les Essais (1575), with its title derived from the French word, essayer, to try or to attempt. The first great essayist in English is Bacon, whose Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1597/1625) is a collection of short “think pieces” (of one or two pages each), each of them showing his careful and sometimes self-contradictory thinking under such headings as “Of Death,” “Of Love,” “Of Marriage and the Single Life,” “Of Studies,” and so on.
The virtue of what I am calling a meditation or reflection or think piece is that, while it may try to get somewhere, it doesn’t ever have to arrive. Such a piece of writing in the context of our professional community would typically consist of some extended meditation on some issue or problem in teaching or learning or within a particular academic discipline. One might, for example, reflect on the problem of getting students to become genuinely engaged with their writing assignments. This doesn’t mean that one comes up with a solution to the problem. It means that one engages in a thoughtful exploration of the problem in the course of which the problem itself may be reshaped or come into clearer focus or its dimensions may be more clearly revealed. Many of the most important articles published by respected literary critics and scholars can be classified as meditations, and some important critical books have been referred to in reviews as “extended meditations” on a particular topic or theme.
Much of the writing that teachers do in their journals in the SCWriP Institute takes the form of a meditation or reflection or think piece about some idea or issue that emerges from a presentation or discussion in the Institute. These journal reflections, revised and edited for a more public audience, constitute disciplinary discourse for the professional community of Writing Project teachers and colleagues. The journal entry itself might be the draft that one brings to one’s writing group at the beginning of the Institute.
Reflections on a class or teaching event are also the principal form of writing required of teachers in the portfolios they submit in applying for board certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
Works Cited
Montaigne, Michel. Les Essais (1975) Trans. Cotton, Charles. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/montaigne/m-essays_contents.html. Retrieved 12 April 2007.
Bacon, Francis. Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1597). Transcribed Judy Boss, 1998. http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/bacon.html. Retrieved 12 April 2007.