PETAL

Making Teaching a Writerly Text

I’ve written here before on Roland Barthes’s concept of writerly texts. There are several theorists I could have chosen to borrow vocabulary from to define my work; however, I ultimately chose Barthes’s language because of the power of its conceptual imagery. The idea of students writing their learning and understanding would seem to have a much higher potential to gain footage in educational practice than those other writers.

Yet what attracts me most to Barthes’s vocabulary of the “writerly” is that I believe that virtually every course, whatever its intended focus and content, should also be designed to build skills that are vital to academic and professional success, of which writing could be said to be the most important.

Writing, reading, and thinking are intimately related activities that all involve the construction of meaning, and the better students can learn to process and organize new information, the better they will be able to integrate it with their own accumulated experience, and thus to translate any text into a meaningful experience, into an opportunity to construct (or write) their own new meanings.

The purpose of education should always be to help students become better readers and writers, not only of their textbooks and lessons, but of all manifestations of the language that shapes the world around them.