"We no longer just read articles," writes Cheryl
Oakes, "we live them." Wow. This comment reveals a truth that was
driven home just this past Sunday morning. Over the last few weeks, I
have been writing about 4th Amendment Rights violations by the Bush
Administration, trying to better understand them. Then, this morning,
driving off to eat lunch at our favorite Chinese Restaurant, my wife
exclaimed, "Miguel, everything you’ve been talking about with privacy is
on the news. While you were sleeping…" and she went on to share what
she had heard about Google,computer chips like Viiv and RFID that she
had seen on the morning news. I shared with her that this is what I’d
been writing about, including how my new iRiver T10 was a foul
instrument of digital rights management and that I had–through lack of
research and vigilance, as well as in purchasing it–supported big
businesses like Microsoft so focused on regulating the digital commons.
As our conversation wound down, my six-year old asked, "What are civil
liberties?"

"An informed citizenry is the bulwark of a democracy;" Thomas Jefferson
is attributed this statement. As a writing teacher, it always bothered
me that we were teaching writing and reading divorced from real life. It
is probably for that reason that I sought out a different way of
teaching writing. Fortunately, some of my graduate school professors
(Dr. Curt Hayes and Dr. Eileen Lundy at the University of Texas at San
Antonio (UTSA)) were there to point the way.

In this
comment to a previous blog entry on "Blogs as Personal Learning
Networks," Cheryl reminded me of Nanci Atwell’s writing about
writing/reading workshops in her book, In the Middle. As I
dug into In the Middle, an old friend for a writing/reading
workshop practitioner, I ran across this statement:

I nudge students to explore the social, political, and ethical issues
that encircle personal experience…when they have avenues for
considering the shape of the world around them…students will take on
the world in their writing, confronting such issues as civil rights,
acid rain, animal rights, environmental protection, nuclear power, and
peer pressure.

When we write about the loss of 4th Amendment rights in the face of
non-FISA Court approved, secret wiretaps, we are testifying to the
reality of the world around us. Wrestling with reality in their writing,
our students–whether they are the victims of a hurricane or
negligence–can find a way of organizing the seeming chaos, the
powerlessness of being a child. In my writing workshop, fifth grade
students wrote about how they captured rattlesnakes, poverty, their
friendships, and more. The power of students writing is that it enables
them to fight back. Instead of passive receivers, doormats for adult
goals and initiatives, children can write their way out of hopelessness
and despair. They can find their voice in a world that increasingly
shouts them out via various media.

As a director of instructional technology, I often feel powerless in the
face of mandates for high stakes testing that render teachers as little
more than mindless drones drilling their students in test-taking skills.
This focus on technology assessments–some call them benchmark or
interim assessments–sucks the life out of classrooms, constraining
teachers to a scripted learning path that has little room for students
writing to find their voice.

As a teacher who modeled writing for his students, as well as writes, I
found that the juxtaposition of life experiences, current events, and
emotion in writing could result in novel inventions. When writing
touches the core of who we are, then that’s when it’s powerful to
others, regardless of what we’re writing about. Every time I sit down to
write, I have to dig deeper to find that core of passion. Yet, writing
from the heart may be a moot point in education today.

I had the opportunity to be in a school district meeting with
English/Language Arts teachers. As we sat around the table at lunch, I
shared with them that my students learned how to write via The Writing
Workshop. Although the school I worked at promoted grammar
(Houghton-Mifflin) books, working through the exercises, I based my
entire class around mini-lessons, group shares, and students
writing…and I wrote, too. We published our work in an anthologies, and
my kids wrote like crazy…even those that were terrible at it when they
began saw significant improvement. So, I asked the district experts on
English/Language Arts, "Do we still teach writing this way?" The sad
answer was, "No. We can’t. We’d like to but standardized tests make that
impossible."

And, just as I was the only teacher in a small school district in Texas
teaching writing and reading a la Nanci Atwell, suffering the sanction
of the more experienced teachers, so will those who use blogs in the
classroom or any technology that puts the focus back, not on testing and
diagnosing student problems, on allowing students to take interest,
ownership, and be given the time to communicate. It is for that reason
that we must encourage blogging in our schools today. At the simplest
level, blogging technologies enables teachers and their students to
write for a larger audience than their teacher and/or peers. They are
aware that technology has broadened their audience. This was something I
witnessed just last week when I walked into Ms. Wilson’s classroom a San
Antonio school district. When I asked her, would you like to have your
students publish their work online, perhaps even perform their writing
about Martin Luther King topics such as prejudice, she calmly replied,
"Why don’t you ask my students?"

I repeated the question to them, and the enthusiasm in this low
socio-economic was electric and nearly overwhelmed me. I had not felt
such enthusiasm in years…not since I’d asked my own students if they
wanted to publish their writing in a print anthology. Contrast the
wisdom of this writing teacher with another commenter, Susan Bishop.
Susan shares, "I have tried everything I can to encourage our teachers
in our school to use the Blogs I set up for them."

Maybe, what you should try is asking the students. Our students crave
the power to make their work known to others. Writing about our lives,
living what we write…that’s a power that can shake the foundations. If
we teach children to write without them understanding that they have to
live their words, what have we really taught them?

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure