When I began my doctoral studies in 1983, I was teaching in the English Department at Barrington (IL) High School in the suburbs of Chicago. We had recently been treated to a visit from Janet Emig—a former professor of my department chair’s when they had both been at the University of Chicago in the 1960s—and her supporting cast from Rutgers. They provided a workshop they’d developed through the New Jersey Writing Project in which we were encouraged to view ourselves as writers, mostly of highly personal, vividly voiced narratives. We were in turn encouraged to teach our students to take on the identities of committed, engaging writers who explored their own experiences through reflection and narrative. I’d also been influenced by an educational history I’d just read that had included a jaunty, conversational, appealing voice. I was ready to begin my doctoral studies with George Hillocks at the University of Chicago, eager to write in ways that were expressive, insightful, well-wrought, and thought-provoking.
My first semester of doctoral studies included a class taught by Charles Bidwell, a distinguished sociologist of education with a seeming life-long association with the university, one that included all of his academic degrees and a long term on the faculty, spanning seven decades at the time of his death. At semester’s end I submitted my paper, confident that by dressing my ideas in highly stylized prose, I would make a favorable impression on Professor Bidwell. That assurance took a hard hit when he returned my paper. His only response was, “You don’t write like a scholar.”
Before his appraisal of my lack of scholarly chops, I’d developed the identity of a writer who brought smiles to the faces of my appreciative English department colleagues through my clever and witty narratives. After this assessment from a titan of sociology whose opprobrious countenance suggested that I would never make it in this business, I felt like a rank amateur. I declared a mission to learn how to write like a social science scholar of the sort envisioned by my professors in Judd Hall. I finally caught on, but it was a long and bumpy journey that involved shifts in both my prose and my sense of self as an educator and author.
Which brings me to this unique new book about teachers and writing. Writing in Education: The Art of Writing for Educators provides something that to my knowledge has yet to grace the profession: a book that helps teachers know what sort of professional writing to anticipate, and how to produce it. Not necessarily the lively, expressive writing I’d learned to produce through my Writing Project experiences, or the less animated prose I then learned to generate for my scholarship. Rather, this book is designed to help teachers write the sorts of texts that their careers will demand, usually learned on their own, often with naïve assumptions and phrasings that produce unintended consequences.
As a teacher from 1976–1990, I wrote many things, mostly with a pen on the back of discarded paper. I used an electric typewriter for formal letters and lessons headed for the mimeograph machine. I finally got my first computer in the late 1980s as a gift from my parents so I could write my dissertation.
But most of my teacherly writing was done by hand. I wrote lengthy comments on students’ writing. I participated in my annual reviews, writing to verify the observer’s impressions of my teaching. I wrote gobs of lessons and activities that I shared with my students and colleagues, and in some cases the profession through presentations and publications. I “wrote up” the occasional uncooperative student, and wrote letters to newspapers on educational issues in the news. I wrote letters to people to stay in touch, short stories and satires that occasionally got published, proposals to conferences and subsequently papers that served as both conference presentations and journal articles, and other texts great and small. And then while teaching and attending graduate school, I also learned how to write like a scholar.
Each genre I wrote in required different rhetorical understandings. I needed to know what sort of text I was producing, what expectations accompanied such texts, and which readers’ sensibilities I needed to address. I learned much of what I knew about differentiating my writing according to task, genre, and readership on my own, or through feedback from either critical friends or the recipients of my texts. There was nothing like the university course that inspired Writing in Education: The Art of Writing for Educators, one that helps teachers learn the various sorts of writing that they might need to do as part of their work. They probably learn (or so I hope!) to write lessons, units, and activities in their teacher education programs. They might be shepherded through the writing required on a performance assessment required for certification; I’ve provided some guidelines on this task myself (Smagorinsky, 2018), although as a byproduct of learning how to design instruction.
What teachers rarely get is what this book provides: Explicit attention to the rhetorical demands of different tasks, genres, and readers for the writing that teachers do as part of their jobs. My studies with George Hillocks (e.g., Hillocks, 1995) had impressed on me the task-related needs of writing in different genres. Writing a letter to educational stakeholders, writing in relation to tasks on a performance assessment, writing in response to students’ writing: All are writing, but of very different sorts. Each calls for different language, different syntax, different degrees of formality, different sources of evidence, and much more (Bazerman & Paradis, 1989). I’ve been told periodically that “writing is writing is writing.” But it ain’t.
This book assumes that it helps for teachers to know, learn how to produce, and practice the types of writing that will be expected of them in their work, and perhaps in the extension of their work into other areas of life. The authors position writing as an art through which meaning-making may become available. Meaningfulness may not be available in all of the writing that teachers do; some is bureaucratic and empty of personal meaning. But it is available when the writer is seeking to communicate, express, persuade, narrate, and so on. This value on meaningfulness benefits from appropriate knowledge and use of conventions, either to follow or violate, with attention to the rhetorical situation in which the writing will be read. Writing is thus, as Miller (1984) argued, a tool used in service of social action within the contours of a genre, and so must involve more than knowledge of a formalist set of features.
This volume provides beginning teachers (or veterans who find it enticing) with strategies for producing many of the sorts of texts that teachers tend to write. Whether for university-based, certification-oriented performance assessments or for on-the-job evaluations such as NBPTS certification, the authors provide guidance in writing teacher reflections in relation to video documentation or other evidence of effective teaching. Readers also get guidance in reflective writing on their teaching outside the bounds of formal assessment. They learn how to write to stakeholders, including families, administrators, school boards, and other invested parties. They get suggestions for how to write aspects of instructional planning, from articulating objectives, to writing rationales for units of study, to response to student writing, and more. They also learn to produce texts that involve more than words, such as digital media narratives about teaching, and reflections on such productions.
The volume can’t prepare prospective and practicing teachers for everything, but then, no text could anticipate every need. What the authors provide is attention to a solid set of writing tasks common to many teachers, and guidelines for how to produce texts that are in tune with the situation and their readers, as Nystrand (1986) once phrased the manner in which good writing enables communication with readers rather than embodying a static, autonomous set of qualities that apply to all writing. As my opening vignette indicates, writers’ relationships with their readers and the community of practice they inhabit determines whether writing is good or not. That’s a sensibility that benefits from the sort of teaching that the authors provide in this unique volume, one that deserves a place in teacher education programs where writing matters. It also should benefit practicing teachers whose work entails writing in different genres and tasks, and whose understanding of how to read their readers’ sensibilities often determines the extent to which an act of communication has succeeded. It’s a great idea, well-executed, and no doubt bound to help a lot of teachers with this fundamental, yet long-overlooked, dimension of a teaching life.
References
Peter Smagorinsky Department of Language and Literacy Education The University of Georgia