An Integrative Approach to Teaching Writing

An Integrative Approach to Teaching Writing

If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

Aboriginal Activist Sister

Teachers of writing have begun to move from thinking about writing as a product with rules, to writing as a process with an authentic, individual voice, to writing as a system of social and political actions. Many feel the need to align themselves with one perspective against the others, but, "Unless we take into account these differences in perspective, we will be unable to establish sufficient common ground for moving the discussion forward" (Lindemann 288). Rob Pope, in his English Studies Book, explains that, "Most undergraduate English courses now have a considerable variety of emphases—Literary, Linguistic, and more broadly Cultural" (1). But how do we decide which emphasis to make? The answer lies in how we see the world, and why we teach writing in the first place. Borrowing indirectly from Physics, I want to examine a quote that may shed some light on what kinds of thinking are behind these different emphases:

A unit of experience can be viewed as a particle, or as a wave, or as a field. That is, the writer can choose to view any element of his experience as if it were static, or as if it were dynamic, or as if it were a network of relationships or a part of a larger network. Note carefully that a unit is not either a particle or a wave or a field, but rather can be viewed as all three. (Young, Becker and Pike 122)

Thus, the way we see the world has enormous influence over the way we see the teaching of writing. Some see writing as a product (static particle), some as a process (...

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...as saying that we are here on Earth to help each other. It is the purpose of democratic education to make us sharply examine every aspect of ourselves, to find out where the story we tell ourselves no longer works for us and create one that works better for the benefit of everyone, and not just those who are already in positions of power.

Service learning is also one tool that can be used to integrate all of these discourses into something that can be implemented into individual classrooms, composition programs, and even as a tool to bring the different disciplines together into a more integrated University. This way, higher education can be less about creating students ready to accept and contribute to the world they live in, and more about empowering people with a critical understanding of the world around them, and giving them tools to create a better one.