“...write about something that matters.

Reflecting about the implementation of our Maker pilot

here in the Central Coast region of California, I often go exploring among my roots in
childhood experiences of progressive education (meaning student-centered, ungraded,
project-based authentic learning), years as a home-school teacher and one-room rural
school substitute teacher, and the whole language/whole child convictions I developed in
my studies for a multiple subject credential at UCSC and as an elementary classroom
teacher for ten years.

One jewel from that rummaging around was the quote I’m using as the title for this piece,
from Marjorie Frank’s “If you’re going to teach kids how to write, you’ve gotta have this
book!” Frank explains that a usually quiet and teacher-pleasing nine-year old refused to
write throughout twelve sessions. Exasperated, she blurted, “Well, when ARE you going
to write something?”

The student’s almost inaudible answer: “When you ask us to write about something that
matters.”

Frank, 1979, p. 14

Maker affords us the opportunity to involve students in activities and projects where they
create real things that matter to them, as creations, and then, before, during, and after
those processes, they write about and reflect on what’s going on. Often the final product
of their reflection may not be a written text, but along the way to a video or an audio
presentation there are many pieces and parts of writing and its processes.

A skeptic’s question – “Where’s the writing in that?” – prompted much reflection on the
particulars of those pieces. The organizational thinking, not just of linear ordering but of

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logistical coordination, which goes into the completion of authentic project-based
learning opportunity is a writing process. The conversation and confrontation that create
the sea of talk on which working in a group depends is essential to the winnowing
process which allows some things to float to the surface and other insights to sink into
irrelevance.

Perhaps most important, the selection of which elements to include and how they are
organized and presented as a communication product afford a context for teaching genre
awareness and meta-cognition about writing as a multi-layered and social activity. Our
students need to navigate in a world of poly-modal inputs, and to see themselves as critics
and creators, not just consumers, in this world.

It’s the creative power of technology, from the pencil to the Kinect, that matters–and our
student/scholars need to be guided and encouraged to take control of the technology in
their own lives and use it to express their voices. Michel Guilin (sp.?) I believe is where I
first read this idea, which I paraphrase: For the most part, in most public schools in the
US, for black and brown kids the computer tells them what to do, only white kids get to
tell the computer what to do. Sadly, my own observations at the primary level and in
general for “low-performing” schools is that drill and kill predominates. Often it’s pretty
good as training material, and may result in improvements in test scores in isolated areas.
But it’s still using the model that the computer is the smart one, and you have to try to
beat it at a video game, rather than empowering children to create their own games and
express themselves as they choose.

I recently completed a ten-week long term-substitute job (teacher on maternity leave)

teaching second grade bilingual, Spanish/English, entirely Mexican-origin families,
overwhelmingly working class. I had to follow a script for about 80% of the day, but the
two bits of creativity we were allowed were a writing program and an ELD block. So I
implemented a unit around using string games to develop dexterity for keyboarding, and
we had a lot of fun. I photographed and video taped them teaching and showing their
figures, and we wrote about them, created an altar for our local gallery’s Day of the Dead
exhibit, and mounted figures into a book for the returning teacher. We used Photostory 3
to create digital stories from our writing and the still images.

With support from a MacArthur grant for digital writing though the “Digital Is” Initiative
and the “Maker Faire/Make Magazine” Collaboration of the National Writing Project, I
will be able to return to that classroom over the second semester of the 2010-2011 school
year, and hope to be able to arrange a field trip to the Maker Faire in San Mateo with at
least some of those students.

I’ve seen remarkable growth among these children with this project-based, student-
centered approach. We have used “We Are All Teachers In This Classroom” as our
motto, and I’m hoping that the returning teacher might be open to implementing some of
the “Roots of Empathy” program, so that the children can extend the skills they are
developing as not only authors but videographers and multimedia producers into even
deeper personal exploration as they mature.

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While it may sound pompous to speak of genre theory as the frame for teaching writing
to second grade English language learners, I think it’s a real key here. Let me return to
Marjorie Frank’s work to conclude. The pages which follow the story of the girl who
wants to write about something that matters include one of Frank’s self-proclaimed
declarations of bias, that

IT’S BIGGER THAN YOU THINK

“Writing” is NOT synonymous with “stories” or “essays” or “themes.” There are

dozens of kinds of literature–some long, some very short–with which kids should
have contact AND which they should write.

Frank, 1979 p 16

The two pages following consist of “a list of over two hundred kinds of written forms that
your students can be trying.” The book is still in print in a revised edition, and I am
taking the liberty under fair use to include the watermarked preview images as they
appear on Frank’s publisher’s site:
book!”

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4
 List of genres from Marjorie Frank’s
“If you’re going to teach kids how to write, you’ve gotta have this book!”

While the list is ungrouped, it’s a wonderful springboard for a discussion of some
categories of writing, and a way to explore the challenges of communicating in new ways
about our making.

One final point: the fact that so many of the items on Frank’s list are mundane makes me
want to allude to Mike Rose’s work on working class intelligence. I think one of the
benefits we can reap from exploring making things and writing about the processes of
doing so is to rekindle respect for the literature that inhabits as well as illuminates our
lives.

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References:

Marjorie Frank’s “If you’re going to teach kids how to write, you’ve gotta have this
book!” 1979. Incentive Publications

http://www.incentivepublications.com/products_detail.asp?product_id=290

Mike Rose’s “The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker”
2004. Penguin

http://web.mac.com/mikerosebooks/Site/The_Mind_at_Work.html

This essay is also posted at

http://wp.me/pwy-5M

and on the NWP Walkabout for the Maker Project

http://nwpmakes.posterous.com/write-about-something-that-matters

--
Fred Mindlin
Associate Director for Technology Integration
Central California Writing Project
http://ccwp.ucsc.edu/
http://fmindlin.wordpress.com/
"Intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do." -- John Holt