Since the students that I am working with are all from China,
except for one who is from South Korea, students wrote a paper that explored
and explained to their readers a cultural artifact from their countries. The
students had previously turned in their final drafts to the teacher and now the
papers were graded, and so, I thought the teacher was going to do what teachers
typically do after students’ papers were graded. She would simply say how well
the general papers were and direct the students to look over the written comments
that she made. However, this was not the case. Instead, the teacher asked the
students to reflect on their process of writing during most of the class
session. The teacher was not treating students’ papers as an end result;
rather, she was using the papers to build on students’ understanding of writing.
Maxine Hairston in her text, The Winds of
Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing, explains
how writing instruction that focuses on the final product limits the students
understanding of writing because they don’t see the various creative processes
involved in writing. Hairston states,“[Students] believe that the composing
process is linear, that it proceeds systematically from prewriting to writing
to rewriting.” (78). Typically, writing becomes a set formula by focusing on the
final products of writing. By focusing solely on the drafts, students are never
able to explore and become aware to the process that go on in between the
drafts. Writing instruction should be more than a systematical routine because
each writer is different. In their article, The
Five Paragraph Essay and the Deficit Model of Education, Lil Brannon,
Jennifer P. Courtney, Cynthia P. Urbanski, Shana V. Woodward, and Jeanie M. Reynolds
state, “Writing…should not be yet another way to train students to be obedient
citizens, but rather provide them with opportunities to develop their thinking
as individuals, making meaning through the act of composing” (17). Instruction based around the processes
of writing teaches students the tools needed to construct their papers in their
own ways but in a way that still leads to effective and successful papers.
Going back to the teacher who I assist in a writing class, she directed the
students’ attention to the processes of writing by focusing on the different
aspects of writing that the students had to consider when constructing their
papers. The teacher mainly had students think about how they arranged,
connected, and described their ideas about their specific cultural artifact. I
was sitting next to one of the students and asked him what he was thinking. He
explained to me how he should have placed the paragraph about his cultural
artifact’s history as the first body paragraph. The student’s cultural artifact
was about Chinese paintbrushes that are used when writing Chinese words, or
symbols. In his paper, he used his first body paragraph to describe how the
Chinese paintbrushes were made and what different materials are used to make
the different paintbrushes. However, he realized how the paper could have been
improved if he had to placed the history first, which he could have then
connected to the paragraph that described the different paintbrushes. This
would have given the reader a better understanding of how the Chinese
paintbrush evolved over time. If the teacher hadn’t allowed the student to
reflect on his process of writing, he could have missed this growth in
understanding of arrangement in the writing process. The paper was more than
just a grade, which only emphasizes the final product of a written piece of
work, but it was a tool to introspect the dynamics of writing. The student was
discovering how to effectively employ arrangement in an expository essay, which
would produce the strongest impact and understanding on the student’s reader. In
Peter Smagorinsky, Larry R. Johannessen, Elizabeth A. Kahn, and Thomas M.
McCann’s book, The Dynamics of Writing
Instruction, they describe how writing instruction should aim to teach
students the processes of writing. They explain, “Instruction allows students
to develop composition procedures in relation to particular tasks, such as
argumentation, description, narration, extended definition, fable, or any other
specific type of writing that relies on particular social and rhetorical
conventions” (20). Yes, different types of papers do require different types of
procedures, or process, when writing a paper. Since the students wrote an
expository essay, they had to arrange their essays in a way that would produce
as much clarity for the reader as possible, which, as the quote above mentions,
means recognizing the certain “social and rhetorical conventions” in an
expository essay. The student, who discussed Chinese paintbrushes, become more
aware to these conventions through the teacher’s instruction of reflecting on
the convention of arrangement and connection. How could the student have
learned to improve his writing ability through a grade on his paper? He
couldn’t. A reflection and evaluation on his writing process in his creation of
his final paper, however, could and, as witnessed from above, did.
