accessing the writing inside

I love the moments when my least confident writers discover that the liability they thought they had when it comes to formal writing is actually a strength when applied intentionally.

It's the golden hour, not some immediate cure all. In no way does this new found knowledge rehabilitate the deficiencies that have accrued, sometimes over years, in these students' writing. This isn't some Hilary Swank movie after all.

Rather, there is the glimmer of a desire that wasn't there a moment earlier coupled with a hope that hasn't been part of the equation. I had this experience with one of my students in the fall. He hated writing. By all accounts, he still does. But, if his word is to be trusted, he hates it a little less than before. Here's how that happened:

In preparation for the term research paper in that class, I ask students to create an organizational device that plays to the way they are most comfortable working with information. The device need only organize the their key research and interpretations in an order that aligns with the demands of the assignment. The form and function is completely up to them.

Here's what he came up with:

In many ways, this is exactly what the assignment exists for. Nowhere is this type of thinking privileged in the traditional writing process. And yet, it is exactly what we should be calling out in students - a correlative frame of reference bridging concept from one articulation (the way it is processed in their heads) to another (the way it is processed, here, in formal academic exposition).

The result was a student who likely would not have met minimum competency requirements using the traditional methods of organization doing so using his artistic ability to guide his written work.

Howard Gardner knew this when he started theorizing multiple intelligence types more than 35 years ago. Traditional measures only measure abilities traditional to some. Couple the work that goes into digesting new information with the way a person is most comfortable doing said digesting and the outcome is greater fluency and use.

From this, I can't help but think that this is what should be guiding the work we do in helping students who process the world digitally use their digital sense to access and perform the information they study in our classes.

In other words, how we can use more technology to make their writing less technological.