Responses to Atwell and Peterson

Atwell's narrative suggests that our task as teachers in general, and English specifically, is to provide students with materials that are accessible and connected to their life experiences while requiring them to produce work that has practical value, yet her evolution as a teacher, and the progression of her strategies, exceed such relatively simple requirements – demands of relevance that teacher education training and my practicum experience have emphasized.

As I have been taught thus far, we are to design tasks that provide choice in products and procedure – as Atwell found with her student, Jeff, allowing options in which one component of the final product could be a visual text could help to support certain students' learning and trigger the evolution of their writing process. Similarly, to generate engagement we attempt to design tasks that mirror real world situations, creating assignments that are practical and applicable to the students' past experiences and present and future needs.

Yet according to Atwell, even assignments that allow for student choice in a traditional sense only provide a different set of constraints. Her rather radical conjunction of the two aforementioned principles – allowing students free reign in their choice of products based on their individual interests and needs – is highly discomforting to me personally. Ceding that level of power to students is a daunting prospect. Even as a student, I would have found her approach immediately terrifying, as I craved structure and strict guidelines. It is difficult to believe that no student in her class responded to her proposal that her class develop individual writing ideas for real world audiences with a resounding “No,” as I would have done (Atwell, 1998, p. 13). Peterson echoes and addresses this concern with his suggestion that teachers should provide students with free choice regarding from and limitations based on content area, as “students appreciate having some parameters set on their writing” (Peterson, 2008, p. 4). Such an approach may provide sufficient structure to account for the learning needs of the students whom I have identified.

Nonetheless, Atwell's realization that the traditional choices provided to students are in fact far too constrictive still represents a remarkable challenge to all teachers, let alone those who prefer relatively structured teaching environments. In order to generate effective writing tasks, the familiar demands to facilitate and allow for student choice and to connect their products to real experiences must be expanded and joined.

Atwell's attempts to write alongside her students, and the lack of success she found during the exercise, represent a similar challenge to the way in which we structure our writing tasks and the demands of production that we place on students (Atwell, 1998, p. 11). Her inability to compose vibrant pieces of work in response to the assignments that she provided for her students – the reduction of an art form to an assembly line production – attests to the artificiality of the assignments that we often provide and illustrates the danger of failing to properly consider the effects and the challenges of the work that we require students to complete. We can demand that students write a great deal, but if they produce dull and dead works, they may not truly learn the craft and the art no matter how many writing assignments they complete. They may not truly grow.

As for Peterson's article, given the practices of evaluation laid out in this university's Curriculum Design course, I was somewhat surprised by the suggestion that teachers should assess both students' content-area knowledge and their writing ability. According to the principles of assessment established in that context, teachers should not take into account students' facility with the English language when determining a grade for an unrelated subject, even though we must address their ability to communicate information. We should not allow students' strengths or weaknesses in literacy to influence the content-specific grade that we assign to their work. Though my associate teacher assessed work based on achievement chart categories of Knowledge, Inquiry, Making Connections, and Communication – assigning marks based on students' use of scientific conventions and proper English – the practical impact of communication marks on final grades was ultimately insignificant given that the relative weight of the other three assessment categories was substantially greater than that of Communication. His gesture towards assessment merely indicated an area of possible improvement to students, rather than influencing their grades. Though my experience has been limited, thus far both theory and observed practice have inclined me to eschew the evaluation of students' writing skills. I will admit, however, that as a student of English literature who has been dismayed by students' apparent illiteracy throughout my practicum experience, I am troubled by the apparent failings of the current system and the effects of the practices that I have observed.