National Writing Project

Conversation Currents: Writing: A Mode of Thinking

Publication: Language Arts
Date: July 26, 2012

Summary: Jane Hansen, director of the Central Virginia Writing Project, and Danling Fu, a professor of literacy education at the University of Florida, discuss writing in today's language arts classrooms in the NCTE Language Arts podcast, "Conversation Currents."

 

Excerpt

How has writing shifted in today's language arts classrooms, especially with the predominance of prescripted programs? What is the role of deep thinking and writing? Two prominent scholars in the field, Dr. Jane Hansen and Dr. Danling Fu, discuss the thinking that needs to be made visible, the roles of evaluation in writing, and writing across disciplines.

This is the Conversation Currents with Danling Fu and Jane Hansen, and today we're going to be talking about writing and the curriculum, and so the first question I'd like to pose to the two of you is how might we, as language arts educators, put thinking back into school writing curriculums. . . .

Hansen: Maybe something they would need to spend more time on as teacher-educators and teachers, is leading students through our thinking processes, because we have been brought up to think that writing is a moment of learning. So when we think through what we might write about—maybe we're writing about a book or a personal experience or a U.S. history topic—we start somewhere, and then we think out loud. That idea led me to this idea, and that idea led me to that idea, and by the time I get to the end of my thinking, I'm someplace where I wasn't at the beginning. And that's what writing does. Writing helps us to clarify our thinking process.

Copyright © NCTE. Reprinted with permission.
NCTE. 2012. "Conversation Currents: Writing: A Mode of Thinking." Language Arts July 2012. Podcast. http://www.ncte.org/journals/la/podcasts (accessed July 18, 2012).

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