Not far from here, in Long Beach, one high school teacher, Erin Gruwell, encouraged her students to tell their stories through journals and anonymous story sharing. Her teaching practices led to the book Freedom Writers, which was later made into a film.
Here, Erin describes the guidelines she set up to help her students feel safe about taking the risks involved in disclosing how they felt and what they were going through.
Erin's work also raised issues of ethical behavior in the classroom. Here she explains what she discovered in working with these issues.
One question that emerges from this film is this: How far should teachers go in encouraging students to write about what they know, in approaching authenticity in their writing? Some school boards and parents objected to too much freedom in the writing students did in their journals and in their published work. So how much freedom is appropriate and how much is too much?
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I feel that students should be able to write what they feel, regardless of what others may think. I do understand its challenging however, but journals are supposed to be a safe place where the students can write about their feelings without judgement. I do think that this work should be screened before publication however.
ReplyDeleteTeachers definitely need to encourage students to write about what they know. It is in this type of authentic writing that students develop their writing voices. The importance of developing voices is something we discussed in class this week and something we cannot forget to model and support in the classroom. Students (us included) are more likely to enjoy writing about the topics that we intimately know.
ReplyDeleteJournal writing is an appropriate daily exercise to encourage personal, authentic writing. If this means the writing will include words that are generally understood as “inappropriate” and topics that may be “offensive,” so what? Journals need to be a place where students can write what they want and how they want. This is where students have freedom to write whatever they want. The primary audience is oneself.
However, it is also important to be able to write for a multiple audiences, including an academically focused audience. The essays one writes for teachers or school administrators, on standardized tests, and on college applications should not contain words that are inappropriate or offensive. Assuming that students know how to write for different audiences and alter their writing voices as necessary, what is wrong with swearing in a journal?