Lauren+Ruhland

=**Lauren Ruhland's Journal**=

Cambourne piece 09/11/07
Brian Cambourne's article "Toward an educationally relevant theory of literacy learning" highlights a shift in the author's perceptions about literacy over the course of 20 years as he questions the traditional classroom approach of language instruction. While most in-school pedagogy has focused on the acquisition of skills that pile upon previously learned tasks, Cambourne suggests a model that more closely resembles the natural progression of language acquisition in young children. In that situation, children are encouraged by the adults around them and corrected gently and positively when they fall short of perfect adult speech. (This can be contrasted with the system in which mistakes are treated as signs of disability or obstinance. Through his research, Cambourne has developed a detailed schematic that explains the success of his proposed new model. This proposal resonates with me after spending some of my summer carting my cousins to and from the library. The older is nearly 13, but he struggles in school. He has had trouble with language since he was in the earliest grades and virtually no work of fiction seems to hold his interest. If you give him a Guiness Book of World Records or a DK Eyewitness guide to the destruction of Pompeii, however, he is enthralled and enthusiastic. //**Yes. So we need to think of a way to take these kinds of learners and get them engaged in reading and writing that requires that higher level of critical thinking (what they call "literature" mostly). I'd love to see something like this happen.**// He takes little out of a short story, but he remembers details from young adult books on mechanics and chemistry. Without realizing it, by giving him the opportunity to take responsibility for his own learning, his mother and I were employing elements of the Cambourne method and allowing him to become a more engaged learner.

Hairston piece 09/06/07
Maxine Hairston’s article “The Winds of Change” was an insightful explanation of a revolution in English education as it occurred in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. According to Hairston, instructors who emphasize the “traditional paradigm” are doing their students a disservice by ignoring new teaching methods that propose innovative ways of guiding students through the writing process. If the English courses I have enrolled in are a representative sample, many of the developments Hairston highlights have been incorporated into classrooms in the 25 years since her article was published. //**Not only have they been incorporated, they have been embedded and we have moved beyond (thus "post-process")**// However, with this shift toward process-oriented writing instruction, it seems to me the “process, not product” mantra Hairston repeats has been misunderstood and misapplied in many classrooms. While it’s true that technical perfection in the final draft is no longer the only way to get an “A” grade, the scrutiny the ‘old paradigm” gave to the finished paper has merely been shifted. Now, instead of demanding flawless grammar and structure, some instructors require perfect adherence to a particular writing process. //**From your experience, it sounds like this abandonment of the current traditional paradigm was a weird shift--strict adherence to rules and formulaic product to strict adherence to rules and formulaic process...which just goes to show that there are some teachers that have trouble adapting to new ways of doing things.**// Idea webs, group brainstorming sessions, and bulleted outlines, once just useful tools for organizing thoughts, have become ends to be evaluated on their own in the quest to produce good writing. The process has become the product.//**nicely put.**// Contrasting Hairston’s view of the state of writing education in the 1980s with contemporary class expectations and Wednesday’s in-class readings (Baldwin’s “Grading Freshmen Essays” from the 1960s and Pafford’s 1918 “Grading Composition”), it is obvious that there has been a turn in the right direction regarding in the prevailing methods of teaching student writers over the last 90 years. Hopefully, the field will continue its growth past the misguided “process-as-product” school that seems to prevail today.

//(Disclaimer: I've only enrolled in two college-level English courses until this year. My experiences are very limited in this field, so I've probably been uncharitable.)//