by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Albuquerque has joined a national writing revolution.
UNM received a $30,000 grant to establish the High Desert Writing Project, a subset of the National Writing Project to improve instructors' abilities to teach writing.
A University of California-Berkeley professor started the National Writing Project 30 years ago. It eventually gained federal funding, and now there are 189 project sites throughout the country.
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"You need to know how to be a writer yourself before you can teach writing," said Rick Meyer, local director of the project and professor at the College of Education.
Wanda Martin, associate professor of English at UNM, said there is a need for writing education reform in the schools.
"One of the problems with our way of teaching students to write is that we focus attention so much on spelling, punctuation and parts of speech, that we pretty much stamp out the urge, especially among students and also among teachers, to feel that they have anything to say," she said.
Eighteen applicants will be chosen to participate in the June seminar. Friday is the last day to apply.
Meyer said the writing project is open to teaching assistants working on graduate degrees or instructors at TVI who don't have a degree.
"You need a credible background to be accepted in the writing project that demonstrates your willingness to learn," he said.
It is also open to Albuquerque Public School teachers of all grade levels, he said.
Martin said there is a big gulf between the way high school and college students are taught to write.
"In high school, English classes mostly study literature - it's mostly about teaching students to love to read. They don't teach very much writing and that's partly because high school teachers are so overworked," she said. "When students come to college, they don't have extended connective pieces of writing where one idea is supposed to connect to the other one."
UNM student Nedra Iwerks said she has trouble coming up with connective sentences for her paragraphs.
"I don't like to write a lot, but I can basically explain the content pretty well," Iwerks said.
Martin said public schools do not have the time or the resources to raise the stakes of student writing.
Briony Jones, a teaching assistant, said she didn't receive training before teaching English 102.
"We had no real orientation at all for 102, we got kind of completely left out in the cold, which was really unfair," Jones said. "They didn't tell us what to do, they just gave us a book and said, 'All right, just teach from the book.' It would have been really helpful to have some sort of training."
Teachers should encourage students to view themselves as thinkers with voices who have something to say, she said.
"There are aspects in our education system that many people think arise directly as a way to create factory-ready workers - people who can respond to the bell and sit down on time and face front, have their papers straight and that kind of thing," Martin said. "The way we teach English is an extension of that, we teach people to get the details right, partly because that stuff is easily knowable."
She said it is easy to base assignments off of grammar books, like diagramming sentences, because it's a way to measure if a student learned something. It's a way to easily separate people into the smart bin and the dumb bin, she said.
"So why do you need something like a writing project in college?" Martin said. "Because sometimes teachers know what to do, and they've got it correct, but they don't know why they do it. They haven't really theorized, they haven't really thought thoroughly about why they do what they do. We all need to be thinking about that relationship between having something to say and getting it said."
