Early experiences with the writing template
Critical incidents
My opinion on the use and value of writing with templates has evolved over the year, inspiring this inquiry. Two critical incidents in the fall semester particularly spurred this project forward.
I feel stuck perpetuating a system I don't believe in. |
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
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In my senior English class, students were given the option of making up a writing assignment that a number of them had not finished on time. Upon learning that they must write an evidence-based analytic paragraph without the help of the evidence template that they previously had access to, and realizing that they were expected to locate and format quotes from Macbeth on their own, each student I was working with initially gave up on the assignment. Many physically pushed their computers away from their bodies as though to distance themselves from the work in frustration. They refused my offers to help them break down the steps of the assignment and locate the quotes. A few of these students begrudgingly attempted the assignment after a length of time had passed, but overall, most of them appeared overwhelmed by a task that, in the scheme of essay writing, should have been fairly perfunctory (especially considering that they are in their senior year and were reading a modified version of Macbeth at a 6th grade reading level). It is possible that they had not engaged with the work deeply enough in the past to internalize the skills the scaffold was supporting, so that they floundered when the scaffold was removed. My Penn mentor questioned whether this kind of dependence on teacher assistance arose from “lack of confidence, lack of attentiveness during instruction, poor study habits before an assessment, a deficiency of interest in the material or in achieving good grades?” (Artifact #16.1). This led me to wonder how the teaching context could supplement use of the template to address these potential issues.
I experienced another critical incident in my inquiry while performing a close analysis of a student’s essay (written with the sophomore essay template, see Artifact 1) for my English Methods class (Kates, 2013). In this inquiry, I collaborated with my classmates and applied relevant literature to the work to help me unpack and analyze the student’s writing, a process that I found revealing. In this analysis, I found the student’s writing to be stilted, repetitive, and incoherent at times. This is potentially a consequence of the template, which enables students to finish sentences and fill in boxes without consideration of purpose or audience. This approach deviates from what Andrews (2011) in Debates in English Teaching suggests is the hallmark of successful writing: “The first consideration in a rhetorical view of writing or any kind of composition is who is communicating with whom?" (p. 50). Furthermore, he develops his position by writing, “As a second consideration, it is clear, then, that the ‘why’ of a rhetorical approach takes into account the function of the communication” (Andrews, 2011, p. 50). I saw neither consideration taken into account in the teaching of the template for this assignment. Wiley, author of "The Popularity of Formulaic Writing (And Why We Need to Resist)," and thus the godfather of this inquiry, describes the pedagogy of writing templates as one “where teachers make all of the important decisions, and students simply find material to satisfy what they eventually realize is ‘what the teacher wants’” (p. 65). In the student essay I scrutinized for this project, I found a number of faults with this approach, which I outlined in the following passage concerning Shirley’s essay (Artifact #1):
I experienced another critical incident in my inquiry while performing a close analysis of a student’s essay (written with the sophomore essay template, see Artifact 1) for my English Methods class (Kates, 2013). In this inquiry, I collaborated with my classmates and applied relevant literature to the work to help me unpack and analyze the student’s writing, a process that I found revealing. In this analysis, I found the student’s writing to be stilted, repetitive, and incoherent at times. This is potentially a consequence of the template, which enables students to finish sentences and fill in boxes without consideration of purpose or audience. This approach deviates from what Andrews (2011) in Debates in English Teaching suggests is the hallmark of successful writing: “The first consideration in a rhetorical view of writing or any kind of composition is who is communicating with whom?" (p. 50). Furthermore, he develops his position by writing, “As a second consideration, it is clear, then, that the ‘why’ of a rhetorical approach takes into account the function of the communication” (Andrews, 2011, p. 50). I saw neither consideration taken into account in the teaching of the template for this assignment. Wiley, author of "The Popularity of Formulaic Writing (And Why We Need to Resist)," and thus the godfather of this inquiry, describes the pedagogy of writing templates as one “where teachers make all of the important decisions, and students simply find material to satisfy what they eventually realize is ‘what the teacher wants’” (p. 65). In the student essay I scrutinized for this project, I found a number of faults with this approach, which I outlined in the following passage concerning Shirley’s essay (Artifact #1):
The template also removes the autonomy of the writer in determining his or her own purpose and audience. The teacher has made this decision for the student and if the student is writing to any audience at all, it is to the worksheet itself. If it is to the teacher, then it is to an abstraction of them and not a conversational partner that the student is engaging in conversation and seeking to convince of anything, despite the assignment’s billing as an argument essay. This results in an essay that lacks transitions, perspective, context, and logical reasoning. (Kates, 2013, p. 10)