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49: Writing for Purpose and Advocacy feat. Bryn Orum, J.J. Burry, John Warner, Stephanie Hurt, & Dr. Richard Wilkinson
14 Plays6 years ago
In this episode, we're focused on advocacy - getting students motivated to speak up for themselves and change the world. We have so many brilliant voices who feel limited to the classroom, not realizing the power they hold. Particularly, we're going to look at how writing instruction lends itself to promoting student voices, featuring a variety of English educators, as well as authors, who recognize how important the Humanities are to promoting a flourishing democracy.
GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
Bryn Orum, director of Rise Up and Write, a summer writing program centered around advocacy in Madison, Wisconsin, who used to teach high school English and further, co-founded Clark Street Community School, who our previous guest, Bennett Jester, attends.
J.J. Burry (Jess Houser), an English educator at a small public school in Texas, who is an aspiring writer and advocate of writer’s notebooks.
John Warner, an author, editor, speaker, and professor focused on writing instruction. Recently, John's work has focused on writing instruction through Why They Can't Write and its companion book, The Writer's Practice.
Stephanie Hurt, an English educator at Brodhead High School in Brodhead, Wisconsin. Stephanie is a teacher leader for the National Writing Project's College, Career, and Community Ready Writer's Program and The Greater Madison Writing Project.
Dr. Richard Wilkinson, an accomplished social epidemiologist, author, and advocate who served as Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham. He is co-founder of The Equality Trust and was awarded the 2013 Silver Rose Award from Solidar for championing equality. His co-author and significant other, Kate Pickett, wrote The Spirit Level and The Inner Level, which both focus on the across-the-board improvements of equitable societies.
RESOURCES
- Rise Up and Write (website, Facebook)
- Greater Madison Writing Project Medium
- Jess Houser’s blog
- The College, Career, and Community Writer’s Program
- Dr. Richard Wilkinson’s TED Talk
- NCTE: Introduction to Writer’s Notebooks
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Season 3, Episode 7
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Season 3, Episode 7 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:17
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
Empowering Student Advocacy
00:00:22
Speaker
In this episode, we're focused on advocacy, getting students motivated to speak up for themselves and change the world.
00:00:28
Speaker
We have so many brilliant voices who feel limited to the classroom and they're not realizing the power that they hold.
00:00:35
Speaker
Particularly, we're going to look at how writing instruction lends itself to promoting student voices, featuring a variety of English educators as well as authors.
00:00:44
Speaker
who recognize how important that humanities are to promoting a flourishing democracy.
00:00:49
Speaker
But first, a quick plug for our Patreon, where you can support our podcast and free resources for as little as $1 a month.
00:00:56
Speaker
A special shout out to three of our supporters, Jeremiah Henderson, Skylar Prim, and Jenny Lucas.
00:01:01
Speaker
Thank you for your support.
Human Restoration Project's Mission
00:01:03
Speaker
You can find out more information about what the Human Restoration Project is
00:01:06
Speaker
and how we're helping to promote progressive ed through entirely free resources, thoughts, and more on our website at humanrestorationproject.org and on Twitter at humrespro.
Motivating Student Advocacy
00:01:30
Speaker
Whenever I've attempted to rally my students up to get them to stand up for what they believe in,
00:01:35
Speaker
I'm really honestly not that successful.
00:01:38
Speaker
Certainly there are some students who take command and advocate, but most just shrug it off.
00:01:42
Speaker
That's not to say that they don't care.
00:01:44
Speaker
Students overwhelmingly care about the problems that they see in the world.
00:01:48
Speaker
They just don't necessarily think they have the power to change things.
00:01:51
Speaker
There's so much untapped potential in today's youth.
00:01:54
Speaker
An entire generation of young adults who care about tolerance, acceptance, they care about the earth, they care about love.
00:02:00
Speaker
Yet schools rarely, if ever, want their students to engage in political discourse, to fight for what they believe in.
00:02:07
Speaker
It makes sense, given how politically volatile the United States is, it isn't an advantageous position to have one's students on the news, for example.
00:02:15
Speaker
However, these issues are core to what students find interesting and important.
00:02:19
Speaker
And seeing that relevance in their work, and most importantly, making the connection that that work is valuable, could literally change the world.
00:02:27
Speaker
Further, our classrooms are places of rank and filing, which frankly is just a reflection of society itself.
00:02:34
Speaker
Our merit-based consumerist lifestyles don't lend themselves to positive, fulfilling lives, and schools are increasingly intertwined with a belief that success is framed by hoarding a lot of money and obtaining the perfect job.
00:02:47
Speaker
With so much focus on purely capitalist gains,
00:02:51
Speaker
It's no wonder that students feel they lack purpose.
00:02:54
Speaker
Plus, our unjust society contributes to most of our on-paper problems in education.
Supporting Student Action
00:03:00
Speaker
For example, a lack of food or safety or just any kind of safety net.
00:03:04
Speaker
For our disadvantaged youth, it means that we'll never really have a human-centered education without making reforms to make equitable communities.
00:03:13
Speaker
If educators aren't demanding political action to help impoverished families, then isn't all of our work just for nothing?
00:03:20
Speaker
Therefore, the question is really twofold that we're attempting to answer.
00:03:23
Speaker
Number one, how can we encourage advocacy in schools amongst our student body?
00:03:28
Speaker
And is that advocacy appropriate?
00:03:30
Speaker
And two, what is the educator's role in advocating for their students and local communities?
Rise Up and Write Program
00:03:38
Speaker
Rise Up and Write is a project from the Greater Madison Writing Project.
00:03:42
Speaker
I've been a fellow with the Greater Madison Writing Project since it started in 2011 and came to work full-time for three years ago now.
00:03:52
Speaker
At that time, we had been granted a relatively small amount of money to do some work with high school students and advocacy writing.
00:04:00
Speaker
This is Bryn Orem, director of Rise Up and Write, our summer writing program centered on advocacy in Madison, Wisconsin.
00:04:08
Speaker
She used to teach high school English, and further, she co-founded the Clark Street Community School, who our previous guest, Bennett Jester, attends.
00:04:16
Speaker
So we designed Rise Up and Write as a two-week summer program, and the pilot year, three years ago, ran with 15 high school students.
00:04:26
Speaker
Each of them came in with an idea of what they wanted to work on, a human rights or social issue.
00:04:33
Speaker
And we worked through a series of like mental modeling practices to think really deeply, intersectionally, and then with sort of turning towards writing with an audience focus about what they could ask their peers, their community, and change makers to do.
00:04:51
Speaker
So those are the three pieces of writing that they wrote.
00:04:53
Speaker
Across two weeks, lots and lots of students got published in letters to the editor in our local papers.
00:05:00
Speaker
A lot of them wrote letters to local officials, influential folks who have something to do with their issue and got responses.
00:05:07
Speaker
They all made buttons because that's what you need for a good campaign.
00:05:11
Speaker
And it was really incredible.
00:05:12
Speaker
That first summer, I was a summer camp counselor for years.
00:05:15
Speaker
And I think that I thought it would be fun and they would write some stuff.
00:05:19
Speaker
And then towards the end of the second week, we really realized like
00:05:24
Speaker
This had been a very formative experience for them, that they were empowered by the opportunity.
00:05:30
Speaker
And we knew it was a lot bigger than just those two weeks.
00:05:34
Speaker
So do you see the future of Rise Up and Write as something meant to be eventually integrated within schools, or is it purely meant to be a summer program?
Challenges in Student Advocacy
00:05:42
Speaker
I wouldn't say that the goal of Rise, Be, and Write is specifically to become a part of the model.
00:05:49
Speaker
That said, I do wish that students had more opportunity to write to authentic audiences, to choose the topics that matter to them and research and know them deeply, and just be able to participate in the conversation that's happening around those issues.
00:06:07
Speaker
I think that young people have
00:06:09
Speaker
tremendous insight and power and a lot of the work that work and learning that's done in schools just stays inside the four walls of the schools and that's just like a significant resource that is underappreciated and is not being tapped into.
00:06:24
Speaker
Rise of a Write is heavily influenced by a program from the National Writing Project called the College Career and Community Writers Program.
00:06:30
Speaker
that supports teachers in helping students write source-based arguments.
00:06:36
Speaker
And that's really rooted in this idea of in order to know a topic deeply,
00:06:41
Speaker
We have to move beyond a pro and a con.
00:06:43
Speaker
We have to listen to people who disagree with us.
00:06:46
Speaker
And we enter into the conversation to listen and then share what we think about it.
00:06:54
Speaker
And I think that that's in a summer camp kind of way, that's the work that kids are doing at Rise Up and Right.
Belief in Student Potential
00:07:01
Speaker
But I think kids should be able to do that in, and not even just in English classes, but in every school, you know, class that they're a part of.
00:07:09
Speaker
Something that I've struggled with when working with young people is fostering a sense of advocacy.
00:07:14
Speaker
You know, there's a lot of anxiety and depression, especially among adolescents, which breeds apathy.
00:07:19
Speaker
And while I certainly understand that adolescents are going through these issues and seemingly these issues are worse than ever, it seems like students are less and less inclined to believe that they can change the world.
00:07:29
Speaker
How do you go about promoting that they can be advocates?
00:07:32
Speaker
I think the first thing is, is really like what I think the
00:07:37
Speaker
your work is trying to do is remembering that they are people and that every person has a story and every person has something they care about.
00:07:45
Speaker
And I think we've really taught young people to be apathetic in school.
00:07:51
Speaker
And therefore, like, it's a long burn to try to sometimes to break through that because we've taught them really well.
00:07:57
Speaker
I think that moving towards a more student-centered approach in education and communicating to young people that I believe in you, I care about you, what you say matters to me.
00:08:10
Speaker
You might have to say that and show that in like,
00:08:13
Speaker
37 different ways over four, five, six years.
00:08:17
Speaker
But I think believing that students can do it is really the first piece.
00:08:22
Speaker
Another piece that I think is really important is work around youth and adult partnerships.
00:08:29
Speaker
And this is part, I think, in some ways part of student-centered education, but when youth really position themselves in partnership with youth and not as the knowledge holders, but facilitators of youth inquiry,
00:08:45
Speaker
and youth design.
00:08:47
Speaker
I think that that is just like, it's once kids are ready to step into that, they just flourish.
00:08:52
Speaker
They have a ton of ideas and they have so much they can do.
00:08:55
Speaker
And it's much more fulfilling to be in that space as an educator and as a student, but it's hard in a, it's hard in a traditional school, but I, I, I mean, I believe we can get there.
00:09:05
Speaker
How does Rise Up and Write then create this community that promotes strong writers?
Designing Engaging Educational Spaces
00:09:10
Speaker
So sometimes I think that when we talk about like student-centered design, people hear that as like letting them do whatever they want to do, like just willy-nilly crazy town, right?
00:09:20
Speaker
But I think there's actually really deliberate design choices that we need to make in order to support, like adults have a role, right?
00:09:29
Speaker
Like, and we can support their thinking.
00:09:33
Speaker
I really think it doesn't take a lot to make students feel, um,
00:09:38
Speaker
honored and important in a space of learning.
00:09:42
Speaker
You know, starting with very simple things like asking them what they're interested in and what they know about it, creating spaces where they can explore that further and share what they know.
00:09:53
Speaker
to really crowdsource expertise.
00:09:55
Speaker
You know, I think students often do and learn a lot of things outside of the classroom that aren't honored.
00:10:04
Speaker
And starting with that to say, who are these people and what do they care about and what do they have to offer?
00:10:10
Speaker
I think that's a way to open up
00:10:12
Speaker
and into students really investing and being willing to see the connections between perhaps traditional core content and the things that they really care most about.
00:10:24
Speaker
So then you're looking at writing activities as well as different types of building blocks to encourage those writing skills?
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah, there are some sort of traditional writing project activities that I think, actually a lot of writing project teachers use in their classes.
00:10:38
Speaker
We write into the day and we write out of the day together.
00:10:42
Speaker
So that's just like exactly what it sounds like.
00:10:44
Speaker
It's like a quick write and students sign up to bring in a prompt or that everybody will write to whether that's like a question or a quote or just like something silly to do.
00:10:55
Speaker
And we spend like five minutes writing.
00:10:58
Speaker
And then at the end of the day, there's a voluntary authors chair where students can come and share their writing.
00:11:05
Speaker
And I think it's a really, it's both community building, but also confidence building as young writers.
00:11:12
Speaker
Usually in the beginning of the week, like people are pretty hesitant to come to author's chair.
00:11:18
Speaker
But by the end, like the last author's chair, we're always running late and we're like, come on, come on, come on, like read faster.
00:11:25
Speaker
So it's cool to see that happen.
00:11:27
Speaker
But then we just spend a lot of time, you know, doing like silly sort of camp style, get to know you activities that I think sometimes get squeezed out of school because we don't have enough time for it.
00:11:42
Speaker
But that stuff is really important.
00:11:44
Speaker
And even though the kids coming into RASBUM, right, you know, have some interest and willingness to do this, it's different than it's not a school classroom.
00:11:51
Speaker
And I totally get that.
00:11:52
Speaker
But everybody still needs those things in order to feel welcomed and seen and heard and ready to do hard things like write and share and respond to other people's projects and feedback.
00:12:05
Speaker
Right.
00:12:06
Speaker
It seems like a huge reason why Rise Up and Write is so powerful is that you're promoting the why of writing.
Purpose-Driven Writing
00:12:12
Speaker
It isn't just the fundamentals or telling someone exactly what to do.
00:12:16
Speaker
Instead, you're actually using your writing for some kind of purpose.
00:12:19
Speaker
What changes would you like to see within schools in order to promote that philosophy?
00:12:23
Speaker
And this is a place where I want to acknowledge that Rise Up and Write is not a classroom.
00:12:27
Speaker
And so there's no one gets a grade at the end.
00:12:31
Speaker
Um,
00:12:32
Speaker
You know, I'm accountable to them like having fun and feeling great, which like we could argue that that's what classroom teachers should be held accountable to, but that's maybe a separate conversation.
00:12:41
Speaker
I am super into thinking about different styles of writing, different types of language, as well as different formats for writing.
00:12:52
Speaker
especially in the space of writing for change and writing as advocacy or activism.
00:12:58
Speaker
There are just like phenomenally cool things going on that people are doing with words and language to cultivate change.
00:13:04
Speaker
And kids get super jazzed looking at those things.
00:13:08
Speaker
I think there's so many things they didn't even know were possible, whether it's like super old school, like writing zines or like culture jamming, like music.
00:13:19
Speaker
sort of guerrilla style writing projects.
00:13:23
Speaker
I just think it's super important to bring the creativity into the writing that way.
00:13:27
Speaker
Like we are not sitting down and writing five paragraph essays.
00:13:31
Speaker
They do often write like formal letters and obviously that kind of writing is super important.
00:13:36
Speaker
But I think being really flexible and dynamic and really thinking about one of the things we really want students to think about is that advocacy and activism should be strategic.
00:13:47
Speaker
There's often
00:13:49
Speaker
a lot of emotion that goes into it and that's really important but we should very carefully understand what is the change we want to see who are we talking to what is the right medium to to converse with that person what is the point of intersection that we're dealing with and so we um spend a lot of time like dissecting and really thinking through those things and you know i think in a critique of some activism that that is happening i think sometimes
00:14:18
Speaker
Without that, our energy can be like shouting into a void or shouting to the choir.
00:14:24
Speaker
And I really want to raise up young people to think very carefully about, carefully and creatively and strategically about how they're using words and language to make the world a better place.
Writer's Notebooks in Education
00:14:38
Speaker
And it's so fun.
00:14:39
Speaker
They do such cool things and come up with really creative and incredible ideas.
00:14:45
Speaker
If you want to see Rise Up and Write's work, I highly encourage you to follow their social media, which we've linked in the show notes.
00:14:50
Speaker
I've also linked the Greater Madison Writing Project's blog.
00:14:54
Speaker
There's so many awesome things going on there, highlighting grading and portfolios and writing advocacy.
00:14:59
Speaker
It's really worth checking out.
00:15:14
Speaker
a job in the special ed department and I got to sit in on a writing class as inclusion for inclusion and that's where I kind of fell in love with just teaching writing in general just writers notebooks that's where I learned about them and so that particular teacher everything that he did kind of showed me hey I could do that and I already like writing so why not
00:15:40
Speaker
This is author J.J.
00:15:41
Speaker
Burry, or as her students know her, Jess Hauser, who teaches at a small public school in Texas.
00:15:46
Speaker
Jess is an aspiring writer who advocates for the use of writer's notebooks in the classroom.
00:15:51
Speaker
basically any kind of notebook that you can throw all of your ideas into or lack of ideas you might just want to write about it nothing or anything um you can write down random things that you hear things that you see um words that you encounter every day ideas that you have as far as fictional ideas or even non-fiction um
00:16:19
Speaker
It's really anything.
00:16:20
Speaker
It's a collection of just your brain.
00:16:23
Speaker
I have a separate journal that I keep as well.
00:16:26
Speaker
So that's more for my daily thoughts and my emotional dump, I guess you could say.
00:16:32
Speaker
And then I have my writer's notebook that I write in to keep my, it's just practicing writing.
00:16:37
Speaker
And it could be a prompt.
00:16:39
Speaker
It could just be something that I heard that day.
00:16:42
Speaker
It could be the story I'm working on.
00:16:43
Speaker
It could be anything.
00:16:45
Speaker
So what's the status then of your personal writing?
00:16:48
Speaker
I working on my first novel.
00:16:50
Speaker
It's in the I'm on the third draft and the third round of revisions, which are taking forever.
00:16:57
Speaker
And then I've written several short stories that I have.
00:17:02
Speaker
Most of them are published.
00:17:04
Speaker
Most of the good ones are published on my blog.
00:17:07
Speaker
I've entered a couple into contests and won a couple contests.
00:17:11
Speaker
Not for any money or anything, just for bragging rights.
00:17:15
Speaker
And poetry, I write a lot of poetry.
00:17:19
Speaker
The micro poetry gets put up on Twitter most of the time.
00:17:22
Speaker
And do students have access to that writing?
00:17:25
Speaker
What do they think of it when they see that?
00:17:27
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:17:28
Speaker
They have access to my blog.
00:17:29
Speaker
When we write in class, I'll put my writer's notebook, which I mean, I know it's going to be a shirt.
00:17:37
Speaker
This is my seventh one since I started them.
00:17:40
Speaker
And they're all full of different random ideas.
00:17:43
Speaker
I'll put that up on the overhead and they can see what I'm doing as they're writing to kind of as a mentor, especially if we're doing a specific topic.
00:17:52
Speaker
style of writing that they haven't encountered yet, or if they have questions and I can answer it on the board, or I can show them something I've written and how we're going back into it to find that grammatical structure or to look for it in their own writing.
00:18:05
Speaker
Because if they can't, if they can't apply whatever the skill is to their own writing, it's going to be a lot harder for them to learn.
00:18:12
Speaker
Do you find that it's sort of an inspiration in a way, not to really sound like too cocky or anything, but does the fact that the adult in the room is an active participant in the field, does that make them feel more inspired?
00:18:23
Speaker
I think for some of them it is, but I think it's more inspiring for them to see each other writing and share more with what they're writing personally, because they can't always connect with what an adult is writing.
00:18:38
Speaker
And they, some students are in that, that level of, well, of course you're writing, you're a writing teacher and they can't really connect with the fact that I'm writing all the time.
00:18:51
Speaker
So it's more important to me to have them sharing their own writing with each other and showing each other what they're doing, whether it be the grammatical structure that we're working on or the format that we're working on, they can see it
00:19:07
Speaker
in each other's writing.
00:19:08
Speaker
And that's more encouraging for some of them.
00:19:11
Speaker
So what you're talking about here surrounding writing speaks a lot to me.
00:19:14
Speaker
I think we need to focus a lot more on teachers embracing their passions.
00:19:18
Speaker
Teachers in general seem to be some of the worst offenders to not practicing what they preach.
00:19:24
Speaker
I talk all the time about the importance of taking time for yourself, creating things, embracing your hobbies.
00:19:29
Speaker
But most of us get wrapped up just teaching.
00:19:32
Speaker
We don't do those things that we tell our students to do.
00:19:35
Speaker
It's important, obviously, that we care about education, but there's a lot to be gained by embracing our other passions.
00:19:41
Speaker
What are your thoughts on this?
00:19:42
Speaker
I think part of it is just sanity.
00:19:46
Speaker
If I didn't have something to do outside of teaching, then I probably would feel that burnout.
00:19:51
Speaker
So yes, writing is what I teach, but it's also, I'm not just writing the stuff that I teach.
00:19:58
Speaker
So I can work on my novel, I can work on my poetry, and I don't have to...
00:20:03
Speaker
tie it in any way to teaching.
00:20:05
Speaker
And really it's about, I guess, personal goals.
00:20:08
Speaker
The students, they'll ask me how my novel's going.
00:20:11
Speaker
They'll ask me if I entered any contests or things like that.
00:20:16
Speaker
So it encourages them because then they can see, hey, we can do that too.
00:20:22
Speaker
We can enter these contests.
00:20:23
Speaker
We can publish on the school blog.
00:20:26
Speaker
We can do these things.
00:20:28
Speaker
So I guess that's tying it back to school too.
00:20:30
Speaker
So it's really hard to disconnect.
00:20:33
Speaker
For sure.
00:20:33
Speaker
That's a great point.
00:20:34
Speaker
I'm wondering then what kind of struggles do you then face when it comes to work-life balance?
00:20:40
Speaker
I think my biggest struggle is grading as far as that goes.
00:20:45
Speaker
Writer's notebooks at first were a huge struggle in grading because they all say don't grade everything.
00:20:52
Speaker
You don't have to read everything.
00:20:54
Speaker
But I really feel like if a student wrote it,
00:20:57
Speaker
I should read it.
00:20:58
Speaker
And it feels personal to them.
00:21:00
Speaker
So it should be personal to me as well, especially if they want my feedback on it.
00:21:05
Speaker
So I've gotten a whole lot better at that since I started Writer's Notebooks.
00:21:09
Speaker
And the feedback is kind of built in and it allows them to get feedback as they go through the writing process.
00:21:17
Speaker
They get feedback with a peer and they get feedback with me.
00:21:20
Speaker
as they go through.
00:21:21
Speaker
So then when they're done with their writer's notebooks, when it's time to turn them in, they've already gotten feedback on almost everything that they're turning in.
00:21:28
Speaker
So except for just a few things and reading just a few things from every student may seem a little overwhelming, but it's not near as bad as reading everything from every student because I've already done most of it.
00:21:41
Speaker
So that allows it, that allows me to have time to do my writing or I also crochet as well.
00:21:48
Speaker
So
00:21:49
Speaker
It allows me time at home, especially with my kids in the evening, because they don't want to see me grading all day.
Meaningful Writing Education
00:22:12
Speaker
Our next guest is John Warner.
00:22:14
Speaker
John is an author, editor, speaker, and professor focused on writing instruction.
00:22:19
Speaker
Recently, John's work has been focused on writing instruction through the books Why They Can't Write and its companion book, The Writer's Practice.
00:22:26
Speaker
To start us off, a major theme of why they can't write is choices versus imitation, where students are often not asked why they write, but simply taught how by following a set formula.
00:22:36
Speaker
Could you start by elaborating on this difference?
00:22:40
Speaker
The danger of the kind of imitation that I think we need to be cautious about
00:22:45
Speaker
is that it begets a kind of prescriptive process where we'll say, start your first paragraph, make sure your thesis is the last sentence in the first paragraph, support that thesis with three body paragraphs, start a fifth paragraph within conclusion, paragraph essay.
00:23:01
Speaker
And then we just have them sort of filling in these blocks to produce an artifact, a product that resembles writing.
00:23:09
Speaker
And if we saw it in isolation, we'd say, yeah, that looks kind of like a piece of writing.
00:23:14
Speaker
Unfortunately, the process used when it's highly prescriptive doesn't engage with the kinds of skills we need to actually be able to write, to create meaning, to work through ideas, to have half an idea and develop it into a whole idea.
00:23:31
Speaker
I think imitation, real imitation can have a place in writing.
00:23:35
Speaker
I remember when I was young, A Bridge to Terabithia, if you know that book, that was like my favorite, favorite book of all time when I was probably about eight, nine, 10 years old.
00:23:45
Speaker
And I tried to write a book with a slightly different plot in the same style, imitating it.
00:23:53
Speaker
But in doing that, I was actually learning how to express myself.
00:23:57
Speaker
I was making choices about language and story and character and this kind of stuff.
00:24:01
Speaker
That imitation is okay.
00:24:04
Speaker
It's where we're trying to create and control the performance in order to produce this artifact that's later going to be judged often on criteria that...
00:24:14
Speaker
does not reflect the kind of process we want students to go through when they're making meaningful writing.
00:24:20
Speaker
All right, that goal of authenticity is so important.
00:24:24
Speaker
Throughout your book, you focus on the issues of standardization and testing, how they basically destroy the purpose of writing.
00:24:30
Speaker
And therefore, you advocate for a lot of writing not combed over with a teacher's red ink and taking a lot of time for mental breaks and mindfulness and purpose building.
00:24:39
Speaker
How would you then respond to the idea then
00:24:42
Speaker
by critics that would say standardized testing actually breeds a more equitable school system, as it's going to force educators to all teach writing to everyone because it's going to make their schools, quote unquote, competitive.
00:24:55
Speaker
Well, so part of what I would say is those problems exist even in the universe for standardized testing is ubiquitous.
00:25:03
Speaker
So that part of that argument, if somebody gave it to me, is not that convincing to me.
00:25:09
Speaker
There's also all kinds of equity issues bound up with the use of standardized testing in terms of the kinds of artifacts students are instructed to produce and are judged as worthy.
00:25:19
Speaker
In the book, I talk about Christopher Emden, education professor who was once a, I guess, grade school teacher.
00:25:27
Speaker
And his concept of reality pedagogy that starts where students are, he thinks of the students' indigenous traits and how you work within those.
00:25:36
Speaker
And standardized testing essentially
00:25:38
Speaker
forces every student to flatten themselves into a very, very generic version of quote unquote student.
00:25:45
Speaker
And they have to sort of perform the student-ness.
00:25:49
Speaker
The trick is to free students up to develop their voices and express themselves in ways that are rooted in the communities and natural to them that are engaging with audiences.
00:26:02
Speaker
And if we can do that, we can't expect perfection, right?
00:26:06
Speaker
Like,
00:26:07
Speaker
teaching is hard.
00:26:09
Speaker
It's always a fraud and difficult thing.
Critique of Standardized Testing
00:26:12
Speaker
But we will get, in my view, at least in my experience, when I've done this with my students, you get better effort, you have a more conducive atmosphere to teaching and learning.
00:26:25
Speaker
And the entire project just seems suddenly more interesting and doable.
00:26:30
Speaker
So the notion that we're going to
00:26:32
Speaker
give up on students if we get rid of this sort of equity check aspect of standardized testing, which, as I said earlier, I don't particularly accept, but let's say for argument's sake, I think the increased enthusiasm engagement on all parts, teachers too, will more than make up for that.
00:26:53
Speaker
We still have to know what students are doing.
00:26:54
Speaker
I'm a believer in students producing work that has been read by students.
00:26:59
Speaker
their teachers and seen by parents and other stakeholders.
00:27:03
Speaker
But it doesn't all have to be the same thing.
00:27:05
Speaker
Not every student has to be producing the same artifact, responding to the same prompt, reading the same thing.
00:27:11
Speaker
This is just not how we engage with the world as readers, writers, and thinkers.
00:27:17
Speaker
And to force students in that box for these tasks, for the purposes of standardization, I think is harmful.
00:27:25
Speaker
It hurts not just
00:27:27
Speaker
They're learning, but they're spirits, you know, their enjoyment and engagement with school goes down.
00:27:34
Speaker
I love what you stated in the last two answers, but I do know the bureaucratic and testing machine are really hard to beat.
00:27:40
Speaker
So a personal example for me is that at our school, all college entry courses require the Accuplacer exam.
00:27:47
Speaker
And I know you're a critic of educational technology.
00:27:50
Speaker
The Accuplacer is kind of like the worst offender, at least at our school.
00:27:54
Speaker
The writing section of the test is graded robotically.
00:27:56
Speaker
It doesn't matter what you write.
00:27:58
Speaker
It's literally checking for word counts, grammar, word complexity, just a bunch of set algorithms.
00:28:03
Speaker
And that's how a student actually gets into a college credit course.
00:28:08
Speaker
So it matters a lot.
00:28:09
Speaker
How do you go about advocating for what you're saying when you have these huge barriers that teachers have to meet?
00:28:15
Speaker
This is really tough.
00:28:18
Speaker
I mean, there's many, many systemic and structural issues that make
00:28:24
Speaker
helping students perform well on things like Accuplacer, work, classroom time.
00:28:30
Speaker
If students are going to be judged by those things, then we should help them do well on those things.
00:28:38
Speaker
To do otherwise is to probably do them a disservice.
00:28:41
Speaker
So a big part of the book, as you know, since you read it, is me challenging those frameworks, really saying we have to dismantle these things that are distorting the kinds of writing we ask students to do.
00:28:54
Speaker
algorithmic rating would be maybe at the top of my list.
00:28:57
Speaker
If I could be like, if I could be the Thanos of education and snap 50% of what's going on into non-existence, algorithmic rating would probably be at the top of my list.
00:29:09
Speaker
That said, even in a world where Accuplacer is going to continue to exist, my experience, and this is backed up by talking with other teachers of writing, particularly in middle school and high school is,
00:29:22
Speaker
If you can get them building what I call the writer's practice, the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of writers.
00:29:28
Speaker
So they really have a deep understanding of what writers are trying to do.
00:29:32
Speaker
When it comes to those Accuplacer type exams, they will still do well because they will recognize the type of BS they're supposed to produce to do well on.
00:29:44
Speaker
And the way that your fellow teacher could defeat the algorithm, right?
00:29:49
Speaker
by writing syntactically and grammatically correct sentences that seem to relate to each other but don't because, as we know, algorithms cannot read, they can only count.
00:30:00
Speaker
And what it's counting is those syntactical and grammatical structures that are used.
00:30:05
Speaker
Once students realize that, you can actually get them engaged with writing the sorts of things that defeat the algorithm and understanding how that relates to a more authentic audience-driven purpose-driven piece of writing.
00:30:17
Speaker
And they'll do fine anyway.
00:30:19
Speaker
And they'll feel smug and superior about it to boot, which is, I'm going to be honest, not a terrible thing for students to feel given that school is so often presented as this kind of game or worse, like a gauntlet they have to run for them to be able to understand the game, to defeat it, right, by opting out or tricking it.
00:30:44
Speaker
Maybe I'm a masochist of helping students see the great odds behind the curtain.
00:30:51
Speaker
But I think that's valuable to them.
00:30:52
Speaker
I think that's part of them building agency and understanding how these things work.
00:30:57
Speaker
And then maybe you do occasionally have to toe the line of the system that you're expected to perform within, but you don't have to like it.
Authentic Writing Experiences
00:31:04
Speaker
You just have to sometimes do it.
00:31:05
Speaker
And I think they still can do well on those things in that context.
00:31:10
Speaker
We don't just have to train them
00:31:12
Speaker
all semester long for that Accuplacer because they are going to go to college, right?
00:31:17
Speaker
Where they're going to run into an instructor like me who then tells them you can't do this and expect to do well in college because we don't have rules like that.
00:31:27
Speaker
So, so the longer we delay them thinking and behaving as we expect writers to do in the world, we're doing them a disservice.
00:31:37
Speaker
Another question that I have that's sort of in the same issue with standardized testing.
00:31:42
Speaker
is how equitable our writing classrooms are.
00:31:44
Speaker
When students come into the classroom who speak English as a second language, or perhaps they're expected to code switch to quote unquote, meet the needs of the education system.
00:31:54
Speaker
How do you deal with those situations?
00:31:56
Speaker
Sure.
00:31:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:57
Speaker
I mean, to me, that gets down to the core of all writing, which is the rhetorical situation, right?
00:32:03
Speaker
Message audience purpose.
00:32:04
Speaker
And I think a big part of, of, um,
00:32:07
Speaker
starting with English language learners or writers who express themselves in non-standard English is to first respect that, that they are expressing themselves well in the language with which they are culturally familiar or comfortable or is meaningful to them.
00:32:24
Speaker
And if you can respect that and get them to understand that, right, to have them see how they are working with message audience and purpose in their own language or particular culture,
00:32:37
Speaker
And then to help introduce them to this other culture while recognizing and acknowledging the occasionally, let's say, often messed up parts of this other culture, acknowledging that this may cause them to not question their own culture, but have to at least temporarily perform some other role.
00:32:59
Speaker
I think that kind of...
00:33:01
Speaker
Essentially, it's a form of transparency, right?
00:33:03
Speaker
I believe in transparency in teaching to help students understand what they're being asked to do and, more importantly, why.
00:33:10
Speaker
It's why I'm very upfront about the limits of what I can teach in first-year writing and why I'm against education technology, as it's often used in all these things.
00:33:21
Speaker
If you can get the trust, if you can respect students where they're coming from, I think you can move them towards this other realm.
00:33:29
Speaker
And you will find students, you've probably looked at some of the scholarship or read about code switching.
00:33:35
Speaker
You'll find students start to code switch very, very quickly with English language learners or in developmental English, which I've taught a fair bit of.
00:33:46
Speaker
It does take time, right?
00:33:48
Speaker
There is a familiarity that has to come in, but they will at least understand that what they are doing is translating where they're coming from.
00:33:56
Speaker
as opposed to setting aside where they're coming from and substituting this whole other person that they have to be.
00:34:05
Speaker
They don't have to set themselves aside to be able to do this.
00:34:08
Speaker
And even when I find when students get more comfortable, they get to then retain some portion of themselves, even when communicating in this other realm.
00:34:17
Speaker
They get to move that other realm closer to where they were to begin with.
00:34:20
Speaker
And that is kind of just the home run if that happens.
00:34:26
Speaker
because now we're cross-pollinating and we're moving the dominant discourse in culture towards one that's far more inclusive.
Aligning Teaching with Values
00:34:35
Speaker
My next question then relates to how we can bring all these ideas together.
00:34:38
Speaker
How can we enable teachers to have the time and resources needed to understand what you're talking about and why they can't write, as well as being actually able to implement them in the classroom?
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:50
Speaker
So one of the things I would say about the book itself is that it is a reflection of my own journey down this path, right?
00:34:57
Speaker
We're talking about, you know, if we add like teaching as a graduate student teaching composition, I have taught college 20 years, all told the journey, but sort of active purposeful journey that's reflected in the book and its companion book, the writer's practice that's 10 or 12 years of, of,
00:35:19
Speaker
thinking and iterating and changing.
00:35:23
Speaker
So I think the first step is to really encourage teachers, whatever grade, whatever level, whatever subject, to do a kind of inventory of their own experience, a kind of reflective process.
00:35:37
Speaker
And what it was for me was I knew that there was a disconnect between what I thought was important and what I valued and what I was doing in class.
00:35:47
Speaker
And a lot of that was rooted in what I call, in the book, what I call teaching folklore.
00:35:53
Speaker
Teaching college, I had the disadvantage of nobody ever telling me anything about teaching.
00:35:59
Speaker
And so I basically started by doing what had been done to me, even though I had not been a good student, even though I did not thrive under those circumstances.
00:36:09
Speaker
I thought, well, I was defective.
00:36:11
Speaker
I was a bad student.
00:36:12
Speaker
So I need to teach and help the defective students like me become
00:36:17
Speaker
less defective.
00:36:19
Speaker
I don't know why I didn't question it sooner, but once I started questioning it, it really started crumbling really, really quickly, which opened me up to reading a lot of books about this stuff.
00:36:31
Speaker
Like the very first book that was really important to me was a book called What the Best College Teachers Do by a guy named Ken Bain.
00:36:38
Speaker
who really, it was like a work of anthropology.
00:36:40
Speaker
He went and observed good teachers and described what they do.
00:36:44
Speaker
And I read that, I'm like, I want to be like that teacher.
00:36:47
Speaker
I don't want to be like the teacher I am.
00:36:49
Speaker
I want to be like that.
00:36:50
Speaker
So the first step really is that reflective is what you're doing really consistent with what you think is valuable.
00:36:59
Speaker
And not what works, what's valuable, what's important.
00:37:02
Speaker
Once that process starts, then it's the journey of bringing your
00:37:07
Speaker
practices, your pedagogy in line with your values.
00:37:10
Speaker
Not everybody needs to share my values.
00:37:13
Speaker
The reason why my guess is the reason why, why they can't write resonates with you is because we probably share a lot of values in terms of our teaching.
00:37:23
Speaker
You can have different values, but until your teaching is in line with your values, you will feel this disconnect, a certain amount of cognitive turbulence,
00:37:34
Speaker
an emotional turbulence that will keep you from doing your best work.
00:37:38
Speaker
I would love, I wish that I could, I was at the disposition where I say, I could say, buy why they can't write and then adopt the writer's practice as your classroom text and all will be revealed and everything will be solved and the heavens will open and unicorns will dance and gold out of their horns.
00:37:57
Speaker
But this is, this is not how teaching works.
00:37:59
Speaker
It's a process.
00:38:01
Speaker
And,
00:38:01
Speaker
The first step in the process is to really start questioning the process.
00:38:05
Speaker
Don't accept the folklore.
00:38:07
Speaker
The second step is to be forgiving of yourself.
00:38:11
Speaker
One of the things I realized as I went through this process over probably 10 or 12 years was that I started to get very hard on my past self as I felt I was opening up and developing.
00:38:24
Speaker
And I wondered, like, why didn't you do this earlier?
00:38:27
Speaker
And the answer was because I didn't know.
00:38:30
Speaker
That's learning.
00:38:33
Speaker
So embrace the process, bring it in line with your values and don't beat yourself up if you realize what you did in the past is not what you want to do in the future.
00:38:43
Speaker
It's interesting that you bring up that you were a poor student.
00:38:45
Speaker
Deborah Meyer talks a lot about how she targeted hiring teachers who weren't fond of the school system or perhaps didn't really do that well.
00:38:53
Speaker
School, I mean, I wasn't like a horrible student because I didn't like to get in trouble, but I knew that
00:39:00
Speaker
I was not doing as well as I could, knew a big reason why was because I was bored by what they were asking.
00:39:06
Speaker
I didn't care about what they were asking me to do.
00:39:08
Speaker
It wasn't that I was too smart or anything.
00:39:09
Speaker
It's just like, why would I want to do that?
00:39:12
Speaker
And then when I started replicating that in my own classroom, I did it because I thought it was what you could do.
00:39:19
Speaker
I'm thinking, as you were talking, I was thinking of the epiphany I had about college being different than middle school or high school with attendance policies, right?
00:39:30
Speaker
where I would get so upset when students would be violating my attendance policy and they would get to like the limit of the number of absences they could have and not get their grades reduced.
00:39:40
Speaker
And I would start like ranting and raving to the students in class about how important attendance is, even though they were in class.
00:39:47
Speaker
And the student I was upset wasn't.
00:39:51
Speaker
And then I read what the best college teachers do.
00:39:53
Speaker
And he said, all of the best teachers that he went and observed, none of them have formal attendance.
00:40:01
Speaker
And I just said, I'm going to try it.
00:40:04
Speaker
And my mood improved.
00:40:07
Speaker
My attitude improved.
00:40:09
Speaker
And attendance got better.
00:40:14
Speaker
And students, we know like college, like when you have these attendance policies, and they really, really care about not losing abduction in their grade, they will show up even if they're half-dead.
00:40:27
Speaker
And so I didn't have like a zombie sitting in my class who's just there because I asked for their physical presence.
00:40:33
Speaker
And my teaching improved.
00:40:34
Speaker
I knew I had to give them something that was worth coming for.
00:40:37
Speaker
So yeah, what you say resonates so strongly with me.
00:40:41
Speaker
And that's part of what I was talking about earlier, your values, bringing them in line with your values.
00:40:49
Speaker
A sort of a last grandiose question.
00:40:52
Speaker
What does the perfect classroom look like in your eyes?
00:40:55
Speaker
You tackle so many important issues in this book, grading, discipline, mindfulness, critical pedagogy, but it's really hard to envision without a tangible example.
00:41:06
Speaker
Would the classroom have multiple instructors across the curriculum?
00:41:09
Speaker
Is it PBL-based?
00:41:11
Speaker
Are students self-directed?
00:41:14
Speaker
I realize that's really subjective given the community and student body and where you're at.
00:41:18
Speaker
But given your circumstances as a college classroom teacher, what does that classroom look like?
00:41:23
Speaker
I like this question because when I saw it, I had an immediate image of a moment in class that hit me as an epiphany even in the moment, which is rare.
00:41:36
Speaker
Often my epiphanies come with hindsight, but I had this in class.
00:41:40
Speaker
And it was a classroom where it had this interesting conference table that was sort of shaped like a wave.
00:41:46
Speaker
It kind of curved and all 20 students could sit around the table.
00:41:50
Speaker
But it also had a ring of tables around the room where there were 20 computers where students could go work.
00:41:58
Speaker
And students were working on an assignment and often class, I don't think I ever lectured.
00:42:06
Speaker
I would occasionally talk for like 10 minutes.
00:42:09
Speaker
to introduce something but that would be the most we're just working on stuff and um class could be some days it might be them silently writing other days it could be them consulting with peers other times it might be like they're in groups of three and I'm circulating around the room talking to them but in this particular class they were working on a project towards the end of the semester and uh
00:42:34
Speaker
It involved them identifying something.
00:42:36
Speaker
It's what I call the this makes me mad argument in the writer's practice, my other book.
Collaborative Learning in Classrooms
00:42:43
Speaker
And the first step in the this makes me mad argument is to prove this thing that makes them mad as an actual problem.
00:42:50
Speaker
And there were two students, two young gentlemen, one of whom had been doing pretty well, the other of whom had not been doing so well.
00:43:00
Speaker
And they're sitting next to each other at the computer station.
00:43:03
Speaker
And, um, the student who was not doing so well, his topic, I remember that so vividly, his topic was on golf because the only thing he was interested in was golf.
00:43:15
Speaker
And so he was upset that, um, professional golfers were hitting the ball so far that the courses they played on were no longer difficult.
00:43:25
Speaker
And, uh, he had to prove this.
00:43:28
Speaker
And, uh,
00:43:29
Speaker
He was compiling statistics.
00:43:31
Speaker
He was trying to do like a graph in Excel that he was going to put in his paper.
00:43:36
Speaker
And the student next to him was like steadily leaning over, leaning over.
00:43:41
Speaker
He could tell he was like eavesdropping on what he was doing and then said, no, no, no, that's not going to work.
00:43:47
Speaker
He's like, you can't just show how far the longest driver of the year hits it.
00:43:53
Speaker
He was graphing like the leading driver by distance.
00:43:56
Speaker
Like you need the average distance because the problem is not if there's some big dude who can hit it a mile, it's can even an average golfer hit it further than an average golfer should be able to hit it.
00:44:08
Speaker
And all of a sudden those two were working, the student who had intervened had temporarily abandoned his work to become as interested in the work of the other student and to aid him with his expertise.
00:44:21
Speaker
It turned out he was a math major, so he helped them do this really cool
00:44:26
Speaker
logarithmic graph ultimately that the first student never would be able to do.
00:44:31
Speaker
That's fine.
00:44:32
Speaker
I don't care.
00:44:32
Speaker
Right.
00:44:33
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:44:35
Speaker
One student intervened to help another using their expertise that was unique and part of themselves to improve this other person's paper.
00:44:44
Speaker
And I, in that moment, am on the periphery of the room, totally unseen by students.
00:44:55
Speaker
which gave me a moment to have a little tear come to my eye and trickle down so I didn't know I was getting emotional in the moment.
00:45:01
Speaker
But to me, that's the goal.
00:45:03
Speaker
By the end of the semester, I want to disappear only to reappear when I'm conjured by the students when they feel they need me.
00:45:13
Speaker
But by and large, and maybe there's like an abracadabra where I show up.
00:45:17
Speaker
But by and large, if I am not necessary to them learning,
00:45:22
Speaker
Now, I think still at the end, I'm necessary to give them the kind of experienced feedback on their process and their product that only a teacher can give them.
00:45:32
Speaker
But if I'm not necessary for the step-by-step of them learning, that's the goal.
00:45:38
Speaker
And it's totally doable.
00:45:40
Speaker
I spent years putting myself at the center of the first-year writing college classroom where I would impart my wisdom and I would say, don't do this, do that.
00:45:48
Speaker
be on the lookout for these problems that every student makes every time they make it and don't do this.
00:45:54
Speaker
The students, their writing was better when I was less present.
00:45:58
Speaker
Their experience was much better when I was less present.
00:46:01
Speaker
And more importantly, their own reflective knowledge of their how to write and how they write was better.
00:46:11
Speaker
Once I made that transition, there was just no way I could go back.
00:46:15
Speaker
Right, right, right.
00:46:16
Speaker
I find it so bizarre that
00:46:18
Speaker
we're basically funneling our most academically advanced students into a place where they're all together to sit down and then they, they never talk to each other.
00:46:27
Speaker
Like, why are we developing a system where all of the quite brilliant academic people not coming up with solutions to the world's problems?
00:46:35
Speaker
Yes.
00:46:36
Speaker
This is what I tell students.
00:46:37
Speaker
Like, you know, the reason why we have residential colleges is because it used to be hard for people to communicate.
00:46:42
Speaker
And I said, we, and you have to go to where the people who actually know stuff,
00:46:47
Speaker
hang out.
00:46:48
Speaker
And now that's not the case.
00:46:51
Speaker
This could go on and on with my critiques of sort of college approaches to teaching.
00:46:57
Speaker
But if we are going to be face to face on a college campus, why would we not take advantage of the unique things we can do in each other's proximity?
00:47:06
Speaker
It just, it blows my mind.
00:47:09
Speaker
Cause you, you're a fair bit younger than I am.
00:47:11
Speaker
And your college experience sounds a lot like my college experience.
00:47:15
Speaker
And that is a problem.
00:47:18
Speaker
I highly encourage everyone to check out why they can't write.
00:47:21
Speaker
We have a book review of it on our website.
00:47:24
Speaker
I personally thought it was incredible.
00:47:25
Speaker
It tackles a lot of issues well beyond just writing.
00:47:28
Speaker
It's the system itself that, you know, needs changed.
00:47:31
Speaker
Further, an English instructor would particularly love its companion book, The Writer's Practice, which just gives you a ton of ideas for writers' notebooks and feedback-driven classrooms.
Frequent Writing Benefits
00:47:52
Speaker
Next up is Stephanie Hurt, an English educator at Broadhead High School in Broadhead, Wisconsin.
00:47:57
Speaker
Stephanie is a teacher leader for the National Writing Project's College, Career, and Community Ready Writers Program and the Greater Madison Writing Project.
00:48:06
Speaker
C3WP, the College, Career, and Community Ready Writers Program, it's a mouthful, is basically a program designed by
00:48:14
Speaker
leaders in the National Writing Project.
00:48:16
Speaker
So actually it's designed by teachers because the National Writing Project is a community of teachers designed by teachers and it revolves around argument writing.
00:48:26
Speaker
So how do we teach students to be good writers of argument and to get them to think beyond pro-con in an argument, which I really appreciate learning and teaching.
00:48:39
Speaker
I think about the persuasive essays that I wrote back when I was a student
00:48:44
Speaker
And up until now, even what I assigned to students, which were, okay, persuasive essay, choose a topic, and what would you do?
00:48:52
Speaker
You choose something you already know a lot about and already have a strong opinion about.
00:48:57
Speaker
Find some evidence.
00:48:58
Speaker
You go and find stuff that already agrees with you.
00:49:01
Speaker
And then write an essay.
00:49:02
Speaker
And basically in that essay, the tone is, I'm right and no one else.
00:49:07
Speaker
matters.
00:49:08
Speaker
And so C3WP has pushed me and pushed my students to really move beyond that type of thinking and that type of writing.
00:49:15
Speaker
And so basically what it looks like in the classroom is it's not a single unit.
00:49:20
Speaker
That's really important.
00:49:21
Speaker
You do it all throughout the school year.
00:49:24
Speaker
Each experience is based around an instructional unit that was designed by teachers and it focuses on an argument skill.
00:49:31
Speaker
So you slowly build up their skills over time.
00:49:34
Speaker
So it'd be like
00:49:35
Speaker
the skill focus is writing strong claims or the skill focus is choosing the best evidence.
00:49:41
Speaker
And so it provides you with a text set around a controversial issue somewhere out there in the world, like homework we've done, video games, any topic that allows for a lot of perspectives.
00:49:54
Speaker
And so you spend time with students reading and annotating and discussing and writing about each article.
00:50:02
Speaker
It really emphasizes the process.
00:50:05
Speaker
over that final product.
00:50:07
Speaker
And so students get a lot of practice with seeing an issue from multiple perspectives, not just here's the pros and here's the cons, but here's different stakeholders around this issue.
00:50:18
Speaker
And here's what each of them have to say.
00:50:21
Speaker
And what I see happen is students change their mind from day to day or from text to text because they're getting new information.
00:50:31
Speaker
And then they
00:50:32
Speaker
We come to that stage of now write a claim and now go back and use the evidence that supports that claim and say something new about this topic.
00:50:42
Speaker
And so it really emphasizes that process of thinking about the evidence rather than like confirmation bias, just going out and finding people who agree with you.
00:50:52
Speaker
And how do you use the C3WP's resources within your classroom?
00:50:55
Speaker
It's helped me break free from the five paragraph essay because
00:51:01
Speaker
A tool that we use with C3WP is called kernel essays.
00:51:06
Speaker
And so we give students a choice of how to structure their essay, and it requires them to think about what they're trying to do with their argument.
00:51:15
Speaker
And so for an example, something that would be different from a five-paragraph essay is a structure that's like, give an overview of the issue.
00:51:24
Speaker
First, I thought this, but then I learned this, and now I think this.
00:51:29
Speaker
And so students have really liked that freedom of structure because it allows them to acknowledge that at first they didn't know much about this topic or at first they thought something and now they've changed their mind.
00:51:44
Speaker
You know, at first they're like, what?
00:51:45
Speaker
We can do that?
00:51:46
Speaker
And it's like, yeah, that's real world writing.
00:51:49
Speaker
That's what people want to hear.
00:51:50
Speaker
I want to hear how something was changed when they were presented with U.S. You mentioned before that you're a huge advocate for using writer's notebooks, which is something that many guests on this podcast use.
00:52:01
Speaker
What are some benefits of having a student write a lot rather than just having one big paper assessment?
00:52:07
Speaker
My classroom used to be a place where writing was
00:52:11
Speaker
assignments were very segmented, like, okay, first quarter we do personal narratives, and second quarter we do arguments, and third quarter we do whatever.
00:52:21
Speaker
And now it's being able to layer the argument rating all throughout the year just feels so much more natural.
00:52:28
Speaker
And when kids can come back to it and improve on what they did last time and revisit the same skills, it just makes a lot more sense.
00:52:36
Speaker
So, and then the other important part is that
00:52:38
Speaker
They write, they do a lot more notebook work, I feel like, through this process because they're constantly writing and thinking rather than, okay, we're going to write an essay and everybody start typing.
00:52:49
Speaker
They've already done a lot of thinking and writing by the time they're ready to write that final.
00:52:53
Speaker
And then I just wanted to share, I think I wrote about it in the form that I filled out.
00:53:00
Speaker
Just my epiphany moment was that you can have a really great program like this that
00:53:07
Speaker
I really believe in it and feel passionate about it.
00:53:09
Speaker
It's changed the way I teach and the way I teach writing, especially.
00:53:13
Speaker
You can have all of that and have the resources, but unless you give students the opportunity to use it in a real way, it still just kind of feels like traditional school.
00:53:25
Speaker
And I learned that last year when I had taught C3WP all year and I saw my kids growing as argument writers and saw their skills improving.
00:53:35
Speaker
I was really excited.
00:53:36
Speaker
And we were around this time last year doing our last cycle of argument.
00:53:41
Speaker
And the topic was driverless vehicle.
00:53:44
Speaker
And they liked that topic.
00:53:46
Speaker
They were pretty engaged with it.
00:53:47
Speaker
And we were wrapping up, writing our final essay.
00:53:49
Speaker
And then this girl raised her hand.
00:53:52
Speaker
And no offense, Mrs. Hurt, but...
00:53:55
Speaker
all the important topics in the world and this is what we're learning about.
00:53:59
Speaker
And it, she was like this very kind and mature voice in the classroom.
00:54:08
Speaker
So she really, yeah.
00:54:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:12
Speaker
So it was like,
00:54:13
Speaker
Someone I took seriously and it hurt.
00:54:16
Speaker
It really hurt.
00:54:17
Speaker
And it was because she was right.
00:54:20
Speaker
I had built them up all year as argument writers.
00:54:22
Speaker
I talked about this is what democracy is.
00:54:25
Speaker
This is what you need to be able to do to use your voice out in the world.
00:54:29
Speaker
And then I hadn't given them any opportunity to actually do it.
00:54:33
Speaker
We had just practiced and practiced.
00:54:35
Speaker
And so that was the moment where I was like, yeah, she's right.
00:54:37
Speaker
I need to open it up a little bit.
00:54:40
Speaker
And so that's what I did
Real-World Writing Applications
00:54:41
Speaker
this year.
00:54:41
Speaker
We just wrapped up with it.
00:54:43
Speaker
We built skills all year, but then this last cycle, they chose their own issue.
00:54:48
Speaker
They built their own tech set, and they had to include multiple perspectives and try to consider all of those.
00:54:55
Speaker
And then they came to a claim and wrote an evidence-based piece.
00:54:59
Speaker
And then we took it a step further by we turned our essays into letters.
00:55:05
Speaker
and then sent them out into the world.
00:55:07
Speaker
So I had kids send letters to the editor of our local newspapers.
00:55:13
Speaker
One student got hers published so far, so that was really exciting.
00:55:17
Speaker
Some kids sent them to legislators, to the White House, to just more locally, to like our principal and superintendent.
00:55:26
Speaker
So they had to send it out to an audience.
00:55:29
Speaker
And so that was a really powerful experience because then they went full-fledged
00:55:34
Speaker
full circle with it.
00:55:35
Speaker
They use their voice to ask for change.
00:55:38
Speaker
And that is the whole point of the work.
00:55:40
Speaker
And how do you go about making all this more purposeful rather than just simply, you know, for the refrigerator, if you will?
00:55:47
Speaker
I think that this experience of writing the evidence-based essay, which was part of the work that I needed for them as a final assessment of all the work we've done, but then taking that and reshaping it into a letter,
00:56:01
Speaker
that has that quality of using a public voice, which isn't really how their essays usually sound.
00:56:08
Speaker
It's very much written like to nobody or to a teacher and it's kind of toneless.
00:56:15
Speaker
And so this experience of translating the evidence-based argument, but into a letter that had emotion behind it was really difficult and, and
00:56:27
Speaker
rewarding and it's something I'd like to spend some more time working on with them.
00:56:33
Speaker
For example, I had a student who chose his issue of, he wanted his issue to be physical fitness standards for police officers.
00:56:43
Speaker
And I was like, okay, that's kind of a cool issue.
00:56:46
Speaker
And so as I monitored his progress, he chose some good articles and it seemed like he, but then his final essay was very like,
00:56:57
Speaker
cops like donuts and he was trying to make all these weird points about that stereotype of cops liking donuts and so I made him change some things so that it would be more evidence-based and more appropriate but then when it came time to send that out as a letter he wanted to send it to the commissioner of the NYPD and I was like
00:57:19
Speaker
Okay, well, maybe we should send it to someone more local, like our local police department.
00:57:24
Speaker
He didn't want to do that.
00:57:24
Speaker
He wanted to send it to this guy.
00:57:26
Speaker
So we looked up this guy, looked at his picture and it's this older, white, intimidating looking man.
00:57:34
Speaker
And I just watched that student's face change because he realized there was no way he could send this man this essay that he had written, which was pretty disrespectful.
00:57:46
Speaker
in tone and so he rewrote it.
00:57:49
Speaker
He was one of the only students who actually rewrote everything so that the tone and the public voice was more appropriate for the audience that he had chosen.
00:57:59
Speaker
And so it came across much more respectful and I think cops should have very high physical fitness standards so that they can do the job to the best of their ability.
00:58:08
Speaker
So it was really interesting watching him process the idea of a real audience.
Supporting Progressive Education
00:58:28
Speaker
I hope you're enjoying the podcast thus far.
00:58:30
Speaker
I sincerely appreciate you listening in.
00:58:32
Speaker
If you enjoy this work, head on over to the Human Restoration Project at humanrestorationproject.org.
00:58:38
Speaker
to find our free resources and wealth of writings.
00:58:41
Speaker
And then, if you think we should keep going, take a gander at our Patreon page.
00:58:45
Speaker
For a dollar a month, you'll receive a professional, print-ready electronic magazine of all of our work every two months, with our next coming out at the end of May.
00:58:53
Speaker
But, as always, all of our work is still available free online.
00:58:57
Speaker
The best practices shouldn't be gatecapped.
00:58:58
Speaker
We're here as a resource to support progressive ed for everyone.
00:59:02
Speaker
Thank you.
00:59:06
Speaker
Next on the lineup is Dr. Richard Wilkinson.
00:59:08
Speaker
Richard is an accomplished social epidemiologist, author, and advocate who served as professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham.
Impact of Inequality on Education
00:59:17
Speaker
He is co-founder of the Equality Trust and was awarded the 2013 Silver Rose Award from Soledar for championing equality.
00:59:25
Speaker
His co-founder and significant other, Kate Pickett, wrote The Spirit Level and The Inner Level, which both focus on across-the-board improvements of equitable societies.
00:59:33
Speaker
To start us off, I wanted to pull a quote directly from The Inner Level.
00:59:37
Speaker
Quote,
00:59:38
Speaker
Today, we live in societies in which worries about how we are seen and judged by others, what psychologists call the social evaluative threat, are one of the most serious burdens of the quality and experience of life in rich, developed countries.
00:59:52
Speaker
The costs are measured not only in terms of additional stress, anxiety, and depression, but also in poorer physical health, in the frequent resort to drink and drugs we use to keep our anxieties at bay,
01:00:03
Speaker
and in the loss of friendly community life, which leaves so many feeling isolated and alone."
01:00:09
Speaker
When I read this, I can't help but think about what our students go through as well.
01:00:14
Speaker
What connections do you see between what an unequal society reveals in our psyche and well-being to what students go through in the classroom?
01:00:22
Speaker
Well, I think it's very clear that the effects of inequality in the wider society get into schools.
01:00:32
Speaker
in a number of different ways.
01:00:34
Speaker
And one of the things we show, which is an expression of the way inequality affects social relations, is that bullying is enormously more common in more unequal societies.
01:00:47
Speaker
Really huge differences.
01:00:50
Speaker
And of course, we think of the effects of inequality rather through evolved psychology.
01:01:01
Speaker
So, you know, to understand the effects of inequality, I think you have to understand monkey dominance hierarchies.
01:01:09
Speaker
And actually, of course, bullying in schools, it's pretty close to that kind of ranking hierarchy, the strongest at the top, the weakest at the bottom, and everyone out for themselves.
01:01:26
Speaker
But there are lots of other ways.
01:01:28
Speaker
I mean, we know how school performance of kids is influenced by home background.
01:01:35
Speaker
As income differences widen, so do differences in these international maths and literacy scores between the best and the worst performers.
01:01:48
Speaker
And we think that some of the effects of inequality probably involve epigenetics.
01:01:55
Speaker
the ways in which the environment actually switch on and switch off different genes.
01:02:02
Speaker
They don't change your genetic makeup, but they change the gene expression.
01:02:08
Speaker
And the reason why these epigenetic processes exist seems to be to allow organisms to develop in their context.
01:02:23
Speaker
And so, you know, amongst human beings, whether you're growing up in a society where you must fight for what you can get and watch your back and learn not to trust others because we're all rivals, or whether you're growing up in a society where we depend on reciprocity, on cooperation, where it's important to gain each other's trust and so on,
01:02:50
Speaker
I suspect that some of the early childhood things, whether you're nurtured in a loving environment, family and so on, relationships, or whether your parents are depressed and have no time for you or there's domestic conflict and things like that, that kind of process can be a little bit.
01:03:17
Speaker
It looks as if it does trigger some of the epigenetic changes which show up in terms of as related to inequality.
01:03:28
Speaker
Partly, I think, because domestic conflict seems to be more important and child abuse more important or more common, rather, in more unequal societies.
01:03:40
Speaker
So I think there are multiple ways in which...
01:03:45
Speaker
inequality gets into the social relationships at school and educational performance of children.
01:03:54
Speaker
You mentioned that people are less trusting and less equal societies and that people volunteer less as well.
01:04:01
Speaker
Do you believe that there is a loss of altruism due to the neoliberal influence on our education system and just in our greater culture as well?
01:04:09
Speaker
As in students being pushed towards this individualistic job narrative
01:04:14
Speaker
they're kind of almost conditioned to care about their own outcomes first in a way?
01:04:18
Speaker
Well, I think that it does lead to, um, defining success and failure in life and very narrow terms.
01:04:28
Speaker
Uh, you know, if you say somebody did well, you mean he moved up the social hierarchy, he became rich, uh, this kind of stuff.
01:04:37
Speaker
Um, you don't mean that, uh,
01:04:40
Speaker
He became an amazing artist, but lived in poverty despite that.
01:04:48
Speaker
And so I think that one of the things we get asked quite often is that surely inequality is a spur to initiative, effort and creativity.
01:05:02
Speaker
But when we were challenged with that first, we thought, how on earth do we test this?
01:05:08
Speaker
You know, what data can we get on creativity?
01:05:12
Speaker
And we thought maybe patents per head of population.
01:05:15
Speaker
You know, when you invent something, you might patent your invention.
01:05:19
Speaker
And we looked at that data and we saw that actually there were marginally more patents per head of population in more equal countries.
01:05:28
Speaker
They do a bit better.
01:05:30
Speaker
But since our analysis, somebody else has done a much better analysis.
01:05:35
Speaker
many more countries, and he shows a much stronger relationship, the same tendency for more equal countries, by that measure to be more creative, more inventive.
01:05:48
Speaker
And it's odd, I mean, if you look at, well, things like social mobility.
01:05:57
Speaker
You see there's lower social mobility in more unequal countries and, you know, more kids dropping out of high school in the United States, which we showed in our spirit level book.
01:06:10
Speaker
And so.
01:06:12
Speaker
Our view is that greater inequality means you waste more of your talent.
01:06:19
Speaker
It doesn't lead to higher performance.
01:06:22
Speaker
And in these international maths and literacy tests, more unequal countries do less well.
01:06:29
Speaker
So maybe when people think of inequality as a spur to initiative and effort,
01:06:37
Speaker
Actually, I think increasingly that it's a spur to overcome the barriers that inequality itself puts in your way.
01:06:46
Speaker
So inequality puts in all these hurdles and so on, obstacles in your path.
01:06:53
Speaker
And because you see people trying to get over them, sometimes successfully, sometimes failing, you think that it's a spur to effort.
01:07:02
Speaker
In fact, it's an obstacle.
01:07:04
Speaker
And I wanted to pull this quote out as well.
01:07:05
Speaker
Quote, and when we feel looked down upon by others and we start to feel worthless and competent and rejected, drugs, alcohol, immersion in fantasy worlds of video games and television, comfort food, retail therapy, or the possibility of a big win become more alluring and draw so many of us in.
01:07:23
Speaker
End
Coping with Societal Inequality
01:07:24
Speaker
quote.
01:07:24
Speaker
With student self-harm, anxiety, depression, and suicide rates rising, I can't help but feel that the system of education is at least partially responsible for these problems.
01:07:30
Speaker
And vice versa, education tends to blame these problems for issues within education.
01:07:50
Speaker
Is there any way that classrooms could help lend themselves to creating a more fair and equal society?
01:07:57
Speaker
It seems like modeling a fair and equal classroom seems like a place to start.
01:08:01
Speaker
Well, I do think that in a sense inequality is about whether people feel valued or not.
01:08:08
Speaker
And if you like, the income differences are the big crude dimension of how much people are valued.
01:08:16
Speaker
and a feeling that people at the bottom are worthless.
01:08:22
Speaker
But it increases that idea that some people are worth so much more than others.
01:08:27
Speaker
And I think that means we judge each other by social status and wealth.
01:08:34
Speaker
We use external wealth as an indication of internal or personal worth.
01:08:41
Speaker
And that's because we do that.
01:08:44
Speaker
We're afraid of other people judging us in the same way.
01:08:48
Speaker
So that leads to more of these social anxieties, more of these fears about how we're seen and judged.
01:08:58
Speaker
And so what I think teachers can do is to try and create, if you like, a mini social environment in the school where everyone feels valued.
01:09:10
Speaker
I remember with my son, we transferred him from one school to another because he was getting bullied, having a hard time, really miserable, to another school where the head teacher had that view of what you needed to do and tried to maximize the number of activities available to kids so that every kid felt he was good at something, he or she.
01:09:42
Speaker
My son, I remember, said that everything changed quite dramatically on going into school.
01:09:47
Speaker
And I think there are also research results that show the same sort of process.
01:09:54
Speaker
So I do think it's about making people feel valued for what they are.
01:10:00
Speaker
And it's the opposite of the bullying culture, if you like.
01:10:04
Speaker
Sure.
01:10:04
Speaker
And I can't help but notice the connection of income inequality with how we treat students in the classroom.
01:10:10
Speaker
We're promoters of gradeless learning where students are judged by a subjective measure that tends to cause more harm than good.
01:10:17
Speaker
What are your thoughts on how these relate to classroom policies and the issue of inequality?
01:10:23
Speaker
Yes.
01:10:24
Speaker
And I think with the wider differences in performance, you get in one equal countries.
01:10:30
Speaker
Um, uh,
01:10:32
Speaker
and probably more on equal schools, the average is less good.
01:10:39
Speaker
So if you create a different social environment and less pressure, less judgment of kids by academic performance and start valuing them for other things as well, I think you probably improve how kids do overall.
01:10:59
Speaker
We've been involved with helping three young men who dropped out with depression and anxiety and so on and felt their lives were a total failure and, you know, they had no futures.
01:11:16
Speaker
Getting them so they could make applications to university, helping them with personal statements and so on.
01:11:24
Speaker
And to have that idea of a future...
01:11:29
Speaker
has completely, you know, it's transformed the lives of, well, there's one more to go of these three, but he seems to be on the road now.
01:11:42
Speaker
And I think it's an example of how our societies waste talent.
01:11:47
Speaker
And with a little bit of support, this is, these young men are in their 20s.
01:11:54
Speaker
But, you know, they're damaged by their school experience, partly, and then damaged by the kind of social environment they find themselves in because Britain is almost as unequal as the United States.
01:12:08
Speaker
So they felt they're at the bottom of the heap.
01:12:10
Speaker
They're worthless.
01:12:13
Speaker
Last night, just helping one sort of write down in a personal statement the things he was good at.
01:12:22
Speaker
You could see him change as he wrote them down and, you know, read this paragraph about himself and it was all true.
01:12:32
Speaker
He just never thought of himself as having any ability or skills to offer.
01:12:37
Speaker
And a huge section of your book is on how unequal societies cause a sizable gap in educational performance.
01:12:44
Speaker
Teachers everywhere are trying to solve this problem.
01:12:47
Speaker
They're trying to power through and solve the education system within their classrooms.
01:12:51
Speaker
but they're faced with really insurmountable odds in low-income areas because there's just so many barriers to effective learning when you're hungry, tired, sick, afraid, etc.
01:13:03
Speaker
And this isn't limited, obviously, just to low-income communities, but there's certainly a disadvantageous position to be in.
01:13:09
Speaker
What suggestions do you have for teachers that are in this predicament?
Raising Awareness of Inequality
01:13:13
Speaker
Is the solution to protest and demand political action when you're a teacher?
01:13:18
Speaker
I think that...
01:13:20
Speaker
It's really important for teachers to make, I suppose, people on the more conservative side of the political spectrum aware that what they see, what teachers see in front of them all the time is this waste of talent due to the effects of inequality.
01:13:43
Speaker
And just like I think doctors, it's really important that they
01:13:48
Speaker
make people more widely aware of the social and economic determinants of health.
01:13:53
Speaker
It's not just about medical care.
01:13:55
Speaker
And so teachers have to say, it's not just about what I can do in the classroom.
01:13:59
Speaker
It is the wider society as well.
01:14:02
Speaker
And, you know, to expect teachers to come, overcome all the burden and divisions and so on of class and poverty and so on.
01:14:18
Speaker
it's a very uphill struggle and often teachers have no training or awareness of those sorts of issues.
01:14:26
Speaker
But I do think...
01:14:29
Speaker
And people think of income inequality as a long way from the sort of issues we're talking about.
01:14:35
Speaker
And I think to point out that it is about people feeling valued.
01:14:40
Speaker
And everyone knows, actually, that they think before the financial crisis, we used to think of the bankers and people as brilliant income.
01:14:51
Speaker
But we still do tend to think that someone's social status is a measure of their worth.
01:15:00
Speaker
And there's now very good evidence in societies, both rich and poor societies, that simply being at the bottom of the social ladder in your society, your own society, makes you feel worthless and a failure, makes you feel looked down on, devalued, makes you ashamed of yourself.
01:15:22
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There's some international work interviewing people in poverty and whether they're in poverty in India or Pakistan where poverty means living in some earth-floored shack without any sewerage or whether they're in poverty in Norway which means living in a three-bedroom centrally heated house with most of the latest electronics.
01:15:46
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There's that same feeling
01:15:51
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of having failed, of being hopeless, of being devalued, of being looked down on, disrespected,
01:15:57
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And of course, that's the link between inequality and violence.
01:16:01
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It's so well established now.
01:16:03
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Many, many studies around the world show that homicide rates are much more common where there's more inequality.
01:16:10
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And it's because people are feeling disrespected, looked down on.
01:16:15
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It's those things that are the trigger to violence.
01:16:18
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There's one way I can make you respect me if there's no other way.
01:16:23
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And...
01:16:25
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Of course, people are particularly sensitive to that where in a society where income and status are even more strongly the measures of worth.
01:16:38
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So I think it's important that teachers try and make people aware of these links.
01:16:44
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But ultimately, I mean, we must move towards we must deal with tax avoidance and tax havens.
01:16:53
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I think that in the past, trade unions have been a very important, and the whole labor movement, a disciplining factor, preventing the takeoff of incomes at the top, which, you know, happened, the unions were weakened from the
01:17:14
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Well, from the Reagan and Thatcher era around about 1980 onwards, and it's then that top incomes could take off unopposed.
01:17:25
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But I think we need now to move towards forms of economic democracy, extending democracy into the workplace, into the economy.
01:17:39
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And about half the member countries of the European Union have some legislation for employee representation on company boards.
01:17:50
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It's weak in some countries, it's strong in others.
01:17:54
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In Germany, when a company gets as many as, I think, 2,000 employees, half the people on the remuneration committee have to be employee representatives.
01:18:05
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And the evaluations are
01:18:07
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of more democratic models of company management suggests that it's good for productivity.
01:18:16
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And it certainly creates a nicer working environment where people are less likely to feel they're just being used.
01:18:24
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So I think that, you know, and it's an enormous job to make the links from the personal experience of teachers trying to help individual kids to these great big societal issues.
Economic Democracy as a Solution
01:18:39
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But the other thing, of course, is that greater equality is essential to moving towards sustainability.
01:18:52
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And one of the ways in which we try and bolster ourselves and communicate our self-worth is through consumerism.
01:18:59
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You know, if you live in a more unequal area, you're more likely to spend money on flashy cars and status goods.
01:19:05
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And that's such a clear sign of the kind of pressures that inequality creates.
01:19:15
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We have to understand that inequality has psychological effects, psychosocial effects, which come right down to issues to do with feelings of
01:19:32
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Things Fall Apart from the Human Restoration Project.
01:19:36
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
01:19:41
Speaker
If you have time, I'd love for you to leave us a review on iTunes, social media, or anywhere you see fit.
01:19:46
Speaker
The more people that share this, the more they will feel comfortable having these conversations.
01:19:50
Speaker
Let's restore humanity together.