As a student I always had a strong passion for writing. I found that I was good at writing all types of essays, and I oftentimes had billions of ideas in my head that I wanted to share. Though I have always held this passion, there are a lot of fears that I still have about sharing my work in classrooms. Even at the age of 21 I still feel awkward when I am asked to present my writing to the classroom. I experience a wave of different emotions that most students feel before they allow others to see and hear their writing: the fear of being made fun of, the worry that my work will not be as good as my peers’, the embarrassment of having to present deeper parts of myself through my writing to an entire audience for critique, and so on.
Writing is one of the most personal acts a person can perform. It requires one to discover his own truths and to present these truths through the creative outlet of a blank page. Writing is the journey of finding the words for what sits in the depth of one’s mind: opinions, observations, beliefs, emotions, stories, information, etc. It is the translation of one’s being into words. Because this relationship is so personal, students feel the need to protect the confidentiality of their writing. This, however, becomes an issue when students are expected and required to not only hand in this personal writing to be critiqued by their teachers, but oftentimes to also be assessed and judged by their fellow classmates. This is a scary realization for any student, and it affects not only the potential of their writing, but also their participation and motivation.
As teachers our job is to create safe and comfortable classroom environments to nurture our students’ writing and allow them to flourish. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs explains that students first need to feel safe and as if they belong in their society in order to reach a point where they can learn and produce, thus, how can students be expected to write and present their work for a grade when they fear their teacher’s critique and their peers’ judgment? The answer is: they can’t.
It is due to this prevalent issue that I have chosen to write my I-search project about how to create safe and comfortable working communities and environments in classrooms that inspire and promote effective writing. I will investigate questions like: What are the students’ perspectives of sharing their writing? To find the answer to this question I plan on interviewing students from different high schools and getting their perspective on things. After all, most of my own observations have been from my own personal experiences as a student. I am interested in seeing what current high school students have to say about this topic. I will also investigate the questions: How does a teacher create a physically and psychologically safe environment? How does one create a community of learners and writers? How does one create an environment through which students interact with their peers and receive feedback on their writing without becoming embarrassed or disheartened? To find the answers to these questions I plan on not only looking up scholarly secondary sources about the topic, but I also want to interview teachers that currently deal with this issue on a daily basis. I am particularly close to an old English teacher I had in high school. Not only was his classroom my favorite place to go every school day, but it was also a place where all felt like they belonged in a community. As a classroom community we had our own cheer, our own classroom rituals, our own inner jokes, etc. We became a family, and because of this bond we were always open to writing and presenting our writing to our peers. It was the one time I felt comfortable do so in school. I want to know what my teacher’s tactics were in creating this positive environment. I have this teacher on Facebook now and it will be easy to meet up with him sometime after school or during his free period in school. I plan on, with his permission, recording his voice and jotting down the most striking and important things I hear so that I can remember what really stood out to me. I also want to interview other English and writing teachers to make sure that I have a wide variety of tactics and techniques to create this safe environment. Multiple perspectives are always important to have when dealing with such a prevalent and important issue.
As a future teacher I have been worrying about having this issue in my future classroom and have wondered how I will be able to provide this safety for my students. I want to create a community through which my students can find themselves as writers and develop themselves exponentially. I believe that every student has the ability to write and write well; however, students need to be provided with the right learning environment to do so. I want to learn techniques and tactics used by current successful writing teachers to take with me on my journey to becoming a teacher.
This topic is not only important to me, but also to the entire community of teachers and educators. Bullying in schools is forever present, and, while we may not be able to eliminate it completely, we, as teachers, have the ability and responsibility to eliminate it in our classrooms. To do so we must create safe and comfortable environments and communities in our classrooms in order to limit fear and embarrassment and encourage and extract the best possible writing from our students. Only then can we, as teachers, begin to be successful and encourage success.
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