Deva Arumugam

Deva Arumugam

Reading Log

Sept 25th, 2007.

The one theme that I seem to get from all the readings this week is the idea that the kind of educational environment that teachers and academic institutions create defines our students’ learning experiences. If the university, as in Rose’s view, sees the writing classes as place where remedial work is done, and treats it as place where skills are acquired devoid of any significant intellectual growth, then the environment created would not be sufficiently meaningful for our students, and hence they would swallow these classes, merely as a means to move on to the more important classes. The attitude that students would have in such an academic environment would encourage for failure, as the students feel that they are not able to play an active role in their own learning because they see themselves as having an educational defect.

The same goes for our classrooms. If the writing teacher sees the writing classes as places where the instructors have all the knowledge about writing that they can easily impart to their students in a series of lectures and assignments, then the students will again fail to see the significance of their role in the learning process. Therefore, the reason why meaningful collaborative learning can contribute significantly through it’s methodology of including the students, not merely as the receiver of knowledge, but also as the creator of new knowledge.

Many teachers see knowledge that students need to acquire as a constant entity that are sub-divided into the chapters that they must cover in one semester, without realizing that even as they are covering each chapter, they are constantly being bombarded with new knowledge that are being generated from how they see the knowledge, how students perceive the information that they receive, and how the teachers and students interact about that knowledge. If teachers do not place any significance on the role that students play in the creation of new knowledge, then the students would feel alienated from their own learning experiences.

This is one of the reasons why collaborative learning, where students negotiate a method to converse and create new knowledge with their friends or peers creates a positive impact on the learning environment. This is also the reason why writing teachers should help students understand the concept of defining their rhetorical situations for each assignment. When the students understand that theyhave control over their writing environment and that they have an important role of interacting with the writing prompt to create a conceptual framework for their own writing, they would see their roles as writers significantly meaningful to the context of writing. This will certainly help our students to feel invested in their own writings despite the superficiality of the writing environment in a classroom.

I believe the same foundation should be used to encourage writers to look at their revision process. If writers define the measure for success with Lindemann’s “student generated criteria,” they will certainly be compelled to meet the expectations and guidelines that they have defined for themselves.

I guess in a writing class where students deal with their own writers’ ego, it is absolutely impossible for external factors to encourage their learning through superficial methodologies that the students themselves are not invested in. Whether our students receive or not receive the knowledge in a writing class is very much dependent on how they perceive their roles as writers in their learning environment. The students in the writing classroom, who feel that their involvement in the process of creating knowledge is meaningful, will certainly see a good reason to be vested in such an environment.