Are we doing enough for the students in Developmental Writing Classes?

Developmental Education: Criticisms, Benefits and Survival Strategies
Research & Teaching in Developmental Education, Fall 2005 by Shields, Darla J

Benefits of Developmental Education

"Developmental education benefits students, institutions that provide it, and society at large. Developmental education's goal is to develop a student's skills in order to prepare him or her for college-level courses. Developmental education utilizes a variety of academic and psychological support services to prepare students. Support services often associated with developmental education include assessment, placement, orientation, tutoring, advising, counseling, peer support, early intervention programs, study skills training, learning assistance centers, Supplemental Instruction, support groups, freshman seminars, and learning community clusters. These services provide under-prepared students opportunities to compete for skilled positions in the workforce" (Shields).


After teaching in a learning community for over five years, there are benefits to a student who is enrolled in developmental writing classes as part of a learning community. One of the elements that needs focusing in the developmental classroom is study skills, particularly with critical thinking skills and reading skills. Even though these fundamental strategies are taught in introductory seminars, it is vital to help the students in a writing class read as writers, rather than looking for generic material.


And more from the Shield article, with heavy emphasis placed on our role as developmental writing instructors:

Survival Strategies for Developmental Education
In order for developmental education programs to survive, institutions must take proactive measures. Recruiting, hiring and developing the best faculty may be the single most important element (Smittle, 2003). Important attributes of successful developmental educators include command of the subject matter, knowledge of adult learning theory, the ability to vary instruction, the ability to implement technology, the skill to integrate practical classroom and laboratory exercises, and a true desire to teach developmental classes. Instructors need to understand subsequent curriculum in order to adequately prepare the students for upcoming courses and they should assess students in a variety of ways based on knowledge of future course work. Effective teachers should also communicate high expectations for all students and respect diverse talents.


So the question remains, are we doing enough as teachers?

Developmental students often require more support (affective and cognitive) and structure than other students (Rouche & Rouche, 1999) and they often suffer more insecurities and anxieties. They need instructors who can foster a supportive, nurturing environment and relate material to them in ways that teach them to not only learn the material, but to learn how to monitor their own learning, to think critically and strategically, and, most importantly, to appreciate the subject.

The developmental instructor should make every attempt to build relationships with each student. Developmental students often demand much more from instructors than other students, thus requiring a strong, compassionate, supportive instructor who has a genuine desire to teach developmental classes to diverse students.

Helping our Students find a Writing Process

If Writing is the emphasis of a developmental writing class, then why not make writing the theme of the class? Having students study and learn from other writers is one method of teaching them about the act of writing. This would also envelop the students as they teach once another.

With an emphasis on process rather than final product, this might allow students to ponder and reflect that writing is the result of a process. The steps are not predetermined or formulated, but within the curriculum various writing strategies and methods are explored. In Berstein's Teaching Developmental Writing, she states in an introduction to "Adapting the Writing Process" that "good writing comes from continually asking questions such as:

• Why am I writing?
• For whom as I writing?
• What do I want to say?
• How can I clarify my meaning?
• How can I identify and avoid errors that confuse my meaning" (Bernstein 83).

The need for observation, research, and reflection is an informed pedagogy. So perhaps either assigning a written in-class reflection the day the papers are due, or circling up the chairs and really having students listen to other students' reflections about writing might be meaningful in a number of ways. 1.) Pondering and reflecting help them to realize what they have learned about writing, but also about themselves as a writer. 2.) It allows them to learn from each other and hear about a myriad of processes that others used for the same end result. 3.) The act of taking the time to evaluate, ponder, and observe the writing process shows students that we value their individual paths to writing success.

Leki states that "it is vital that writing instruction involve feedback in the intermediate steps rather than at the end" (Berstein 84). Rather than reading the rough drafts, try reading the opening paragraphs or have them write journals that build up the paper. Fluid feedback is crucial to the developmental writing student.

More to come on how to give quality and useful feedback to students.

How about a Literacy Narrative?

For the past few days I have been immersed in writing theory, particularly in the instruction of the Literacy Narrative as the first assignment in a developmental writing class. I hit a gold mine, simply because there is an abundance of solid research validating and assessing this assignment, both academically and personally for students as developing writers and learners.
The next few posts might be a series of Literacy Narrative posts, as to make sure that we are looking at this from all angles.

Once again, if we go back to building a course around writing and helping our students to understand and embrace why writing matters, we must introduce some essence of a rhetorical awareness to our students, so that they can begin to see writing with a myriad of purposes, other than for a grade in the classroom. Life-long writers is what we are after. But with this hope, comes a lot of looking back, hence the Janus Figure is introduced during the opening week of class.


The Janus Figure is a powerful metaphor because it is something visual that the students can hold in their minds while they are looking back and also forward in the same piece of writing. I use this in almost every writing class particularly when students are doing a sort of personal/autobiographical piece of writing where they are looking back and discovering how the past shapes pieces of the future. The more research I find on Literacy Narratives, the more fascinating the Janus Figure becomes as a viable teaching tool within this genre.


Susan DeRosa has a foundational article in this conversation, entitled "Literacy Narratives as Genres of Possibility: Students' Voices, Reflective Writing, and Rhetorical Awareness." She bases her whole premise on the fact that students placed in developmental writing courses often have self-perceptions based on outcomes of standardized writing assessment tools or what they've been told by the experts--past teachers who have labeled them. This causes students to have a narrowed definition of literacy,which is often what they bring with them to our classes. What they don't realize is that literacy is fluid, not static or fixed. Writing is not a set of skills to be measured in a single writing event/test or acquired in a semester of a college writing course.


We could consider a starting point of our conversation as writing teachers with these two questions DeRosa asks:

• What pedagogical strategies could I use to offer my writing students a space to reflect on, or even challenge, these limiting ideas about literacy?
• How would such reflective writing encourage them to rethink their roles as writers--writers who make choices based on rhetorical situations?

Literacy Narratives may provide us with an opportunity to explore changing versions or literacy and writers' visions of themselves as writers. DeRosa argues that "student-produced literacy narratives can encourage self-reflective learning and help students develop a sense of critical agency about their literacy practices."

The literacy narrative is a more specific, targeted version of the autobiographical and biographical essays. Its emphases on literacy and knowledge would seem like a natural fit to a developmental writing class that focuses on Writing as the theme, or subject matter. Trimbur states that "the term literacy event gives us a way to think about how reading and writing enter our lives and shape our interactions with others."

The purpose of a literacy narrative is to look at a time in your life when reading and writing had a significant effect on you, and then to analyze this effect in writing, which is the reflection and ponder part of the writing assignment. Often times students will discover some fascinating pieces of who they are as a writer, and who they have the potential to become. It is a narrative essay that focuses on an issue related to writing, reading, and education. This type of writing is especially relevant to writers and writing students. Also note that we should not limit students to only classroom events. Home life, influences or lack of reading in the home, might be just one example that might contribute to a student's story of literacy.

Lastly, DeRosa claims that "by writing self-reflectively about their literacy practices in narratives, students may: 1)identify and reflect on their roles and responsibilities as writers--a sense of ethos; 2) develop understanding of their literacy in flux and a sense of agency as writers; and 3) develop awareness of their "literacy in action"-the ways that their writing can effect change in their communities---a sense of civic literacy."

As students look back at where they have been with writing, reading, and their education, the literacy narratives allows them the space to reflect on how it has shaped who they are today, and also how they will move forward to this continuous process called learning.

Sharing the literacy narratives in peer workshop could be a very nice way to create a strong classroom community where students begin to teach one another.