Empoword

How to Use This Book xxxii • Writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum . Almost all writing involves an exchange between a writer and their audience. Even on the professional level, the best writing is produced collaboratively, using feedback from a cohort of trusted peers. However, many of our students have been trained to believe that their schoolwork is their business and no one else’s—or, at best, that their sole audience is the red-pen-toting teacher. Instead, this text emphasizes collaboration to model real-world writing situations. • Writing is hard . Writing is hard because learning is hard: growth only occurs under challenging circumstances. Additionally, whether our students are writing a personal narrative or a research essay, they are putting themselves in a position of vulnerability. While the concept of an entirely “safe space” is largely a myth, it is important that they feel supported by their classmates and their instructor to ensure that this vulnerability is productive. • Communities are, to some extent, horizontal . The vertical power dynamic that plagues many college classrooms, where the all-knowing teacher deposits knowledge into their ignorant students, must be dismantled for true learning to take place. Students need to be able to claim the knowledge and skills they build in the classroom, and they can only do so if they feel they have a stake in the mission and operation of the class . 1 • Communities have shared goals and values, but also diversity within them . Each member might have a different path to those goals, might have different needs along the way, might have additional individual goals—but there’s value in acknowledging the destinations we pursue together. • Learning communities are not just communities of learners, but also communities that learn . I’ve taught awesome classes, and I’ve taught classes that I dreaded attending. But all of those classes have had one thing in common: they were never exactly what I expected. It is crucial to acknowledge that no matter how much planning we do, our communities will have unanticipated strengths, needs, successes, and failures. Communities that learn adapt to their internal idiosyncrasies in order to make shared goals more accessible to everyone. Furthermore, the skills and concepts for building community that your students learn with carry them forth to shape their future communities. I will take a moment to clarify: the concept of the learning community is not simply a classroom management technique or a pedagogical suggestion. Rather, I find the learning experience inherent in building and sustaining a community to be inextricable from learning about composition. Developing writers have more to offer one another than any textbook could. Although this book seeks to provide pragmatic and meaty instruction on writing skills, it is from this core assumption that I operate: Writers write best among other writers. Learners learn best among other learners.