GREEN & GROW

By Carolyn Lucey

When I think about my student’s best writing in the past, whether narrative or analytical, poetry or prose, I’ve noticed one common thread: the writing was almost always produced in relationship or response to a mentor text, though I didn’t have the language for the pedagogical practice at the time. I think about the narrative writing my 7th graders created while mimicking Steinbeck’s The Pearl, for instance, which surprised me in its beauty and sophistication. Rather than focusing on a reductionist list of “requirements” for narrative writing, students and I collaboratively explored what Steinbeck was doing that made his writing so impactful. We noticed the use of rich descriptive language in all five senses; the simplicity of vocabulary; a lack of inner monologue; the way that his setting descriptions established the mood of each scene. Inquiry stance and mentor texts. Ultimately, the writing that my students produced included many of these sophisticated tools, and many others that were implicitly absorbed as they responded to the text. 

But the application of a Writer’s Workshop is much more rich (and nuanced!) then simply having a pile of texts to use in a writing conference with students. As I thought about sharing this catalog of texts with the world, I wanted to outline a few key ideas I had about how and why I would actually implement their use in a classroom.

Engaging in authentic, inquiry-driven writing tasks: 

In The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers, by Sheridan Blau, he notices a common challenge with writing in most English classrooms. Blau states that we typically want students to write “so that they can have the experience of constructing knowledge for themselves” but usually “get papers that are warmed-over versions of somebody else’s cooking” (Blau 153). Blau reminds teacher’s not to give prompts that are full of hidden agendas, and implicit expectations about what the students are “supposed” to write. 

So — how to invigorate writing? How to make it seem both a place for thinking and discovery, as well as treating it as the craft it is? A craft in which it might be useful to have certain tools and methods at one’s disposal, but which requires the creative input of the maker each time? 

One adjustment I attempt in this proposed class is asking writers to engage in genuine questions: What does “the environment” mean to you (and to us as a society?); what importance does it hold?; and — a question we are still trying to solve, even the authors found in this site — how can we use writing to inspire, challenge, motivate, and pose actionable solutions for the issues that plague our fraught relationship with the natural world — issues ranging from the small (giving children free-range places to play) to the social (why is the outdoor industry so white?)?

In Naming What we Know: Threshold Concepts for Writing Studies, by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabelth Wardle, Heidi Estreem says, “less visible is what [writing] can do: generate new thinking. As an activity undertaken to bring new understandings, writing in this sense is not about crafting a sentence or perfecting a text, but about mulling over a problem, thinking with others, and exploring new ideas or bringing disparate ideas together.” 

We don’t yet have ossified solutions for these questions. There is no single form that writers use to address these questions. Students will need to attempt their own responses, perhaps drawing on tools and examples from their mentor texts, and perhaps inventing their own. 

Process over product: 

In my vision for this course, students would engage regularly in writing logs. In those logs, they would have an opportunity to write about their own experiences (at times freely, at times responding to prompts or field trips); they would also be asked to respond to our readings in class. Those responses might be interested in the content of the author’s ideas, or perhaps a phrase or technique that stood out to them, or even a seed for their own writing inspired by a stylistic choice that the author made. 

Throughout the course, students would select some texts to develop more fully into finished pieces. These pieces would be developed through writing conferences with both the teacher and peers. 

In Clearing the Way: Working with Teenage Writers, by Tom Romano, he emphasizes the importance of conferencing with students. Romano encourages us to start with “pointing” (a term coigned by Peter Elbow), in which the conference states what they “got out” of this piece of writing. The conferencer can also engage in (hopefully genuine) questions. These questions should not come from a place as an “expert”, in which there is a correct answer. Instead, they should approach the material as a “reader” (or possibly an ‘expert reader’, one who is particularly attuned to writing), one who might genuinely not understand a transition, context, a shift in tone. These conferences serve as an opportunity to help students notice what they’re already doing; think about what next questions and tools they might need to move forward; and identify tangible next steps. 

The writing conference doesn’t only need to be about perfecting a particular style or element of writing. It might be that the end result is a piece of the process you want a student to work on (brainstorming or revising). But when model texts are involved, this website would serve as a rich resource for the teacher to find possible texts that might address a particular skill, or even a stance towards the content that they want the reader to experiment with. 

Ultimately, students would actively choose genres, styles, and techniques that they decide meets the needs of their topic, audience, and purpose. They would create a final portfolio chosen out of the pieces that they developed over the course of the semester. 

Using Mentor Texts: 

Sheridan Blau states: “Every act of writing (and possibly every utterance) is shaped and understood by the constraints and traditions of the genre in which it participates.” (Blau 173). The course would serve as an exploration of the “genre”. But “genre”, here, is used in a wide and unusual sense: environmental writing incorporates poetry, essays, fiction, but also video, multi-modal graphs and more. 

Students might go to mentor texts for different reasons: in some cases, I might point them in a direction to explore a traditional literary device (use of metaphor or descriptive language); in others, I might use a mentor text to invite a student to think about how they’ve organized their essay, perhaps in an exploratory format or a more rigid argumentative way; I might ask a student who is writing an essay to use a poem as a mentor text to consider tone or style; I might point a student writing a speech towards a video that does an excellent job of describing a problem in clear language. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to fill out the website with the full depth and breadth of mentor texts that would be available for students to explore. But I want students to think expansively about how they can convey their ideas on this topic.