One Final Note

I would like to take a few moments to articulate what appears to be enormous pessimism on my part toward the many pedagogies I have read in GCP. My reluctance to accept any of them as perfect and my prying at the holes in each thus making gashes from pin pricks is not outright renunciation of all pedagogical methods. I do not think that every method is without useless and that none can benefit a classroom. However, I am not sold on the complete embrasure of any one of the presented pedagogies because I have seen (and shown) that within each are deficiencies. I am also a beginner in the study of writing pedagogy and am not even a practitioner at this point. I am still learning to articulate within my own mind what it is I want for my students, what I want to bring to the classroom, how I want to bring it, and why I want to bring it. I see this inquiry into all of these pedagogical practices as analogous to the research one does before making an expensive purchase. I know what good I want to come from my chosen pedagogical path: I want students to love writing, to succeed at it academically and professionally; I want them to find pleasure as well as produce pleasure with their writing; I (in the egotistical teacher’s sense) want to be the greatest educational (and possibly personal) impact on their lives. Since I know what I want, all I have left to do is to seek out what pedagogies (i.e., product) will afford me all of that at the least cost to me. I do not want to pay for the students to have good grammar with a bad attention to audience. I don’t want to pay for a good attention to audience with the loss of their individual writing identities. Etc., etc., etc. Thus, my inquiry and blog responses have boiled down to recognizing where the greatest deficiencies lie and where I can pay the least and get the most in return for my pedagogical investment. So what I have been writing has not been unhappiness toward all teaching models; rather, I have been sharing my analyses of the negative without sharing the parts with which I agree. If I have not spoken of a facet it is because I agree with it. I feel as though I do not need to say that girls should be treated equitably or that recognition of different cultural influences is necessary or that students teaching students can benefit both, etc. It is unnecessary; we all know that those are good. However, we often forget to look for the holes that weaken the pedagogical structure as a whole and ignoring these holes will only lead to greater problems that will be discovered in later scholarly research.

Thank you for reading this blog. I hope that my argumentative attitude toward pretty much every reading we had has not put you in a negative mood toward teaching writing, for I feel that my arguments could make one feel that there is no hope in teaching writing: “There’s something wrong with everything according to Josh.” But it isn’t so bad. The very fact that I am a young person who is willing to invest a critical eye in the way student’s lives are shaped should be enough to put what I have written (no matter who negative) into a positive light. I am offering ways by which pedagogues might make tomorrow’s education better for our students.