Dive in and Get Comfortable: Writing Instruction as Environment

From a colleague in Ohio!

By Michelle A. Miller, Ph.D.

In a previous life as a small town weekly newspaper sports columnist, I interviewed a high school swimmer whose father was the swimming coach. “What it is like to be a coach’s kid and team member?”  I asked this to several “kids” of various ages and their dad coaches, including my own siblings and father, for a two-part series. This late high school boy spoke well and eagerly on a topic he seemed to have been waiting for years to be asked about.  I understood this eagerness because this topic also hit home for me; my dad coached six of his seven children, and we fought preconceptions, misconceptions and certainly what we saw as intermittent unjustified jealousy as we played basketball and ran track on our dad’s teams.
One thing this young man said stays with me still, and it had nothing to do with our common adolescent social discomfort. He spoke about the environment of the swimming pool, the moist tropical air, the sharp chill of the sudden water, the scent of chlorine, and then there was the weird, demanding schedule that had him eating breakfast at the pool after morning workouts. So many peers thought this all was weird, so weird as to make anyone who liked it weird, but he didn’t care; to him, the pool felt more like home than anywhere, and he wouldn’t trade that for anything.
I liked what he said. I recognized it immediately but not as a coach’s kid but as a writer. Much of what he said about swimming and the pool environment could describe how I felt about writing. True, I didn’t love the environment of writing the way this young man loved being in the pool environment, but after this conversation, I no longer saw writing as an activity so much as an environment, a world, a swirl with me in the middle of it, a swirl with me having the power to swirl it back and change that world through my efforts and uniqueness.
No, I didn’t and don’t take to writing like a fish to water. In fact, I often avoid writing. It seems cold and chemically and surely will take effort. Mid-twentieth century sportswriter Red Smith stated that writing is as easy as sitting at a typewriter and opening a vein.  There’s a lot of truth in that for me as I contemplate writing and consider sending myself off the deck into the middle of it.  However, that is only half of it, my view of writing from the outside, writing before I dive in, writing when I would rather be watching TV, chatting, reading, shopping, eating, exercising, playing around on the Internet, or even grading papers or cleaning. That is the avoidance, the apprehension of having to open a vein at the computer (no more typewriters; this is a new century but the same open veins). But fortunately, I know from experience that there is more to writing than the apprehension.
There is also the being in the middle of it, the typing, the hand writing, the inspiration, the “ice sliding on a hot stove” side of writing Robert Frost used as a description of writing poetry; there was the excitement of not knowing where the writing, like the ice, would slide, the feeling of being at the beginning of, the middle of, the instigator of…creation.  That’s where writing is like swimming; it’s effort but joyful; it’s being in the zone, being in an altogether different environment, weightless, forgiving but with that challenge, the “flow”  that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  wrote about, where challenge is just challenging enough that it is stimulating but not so challenging it is off-putting.  I sometimes compare writing to creating your own experiments, designing your own problems, and then churning your way to solutions and discovery. That is true differentiated learning.
This is where writing becomes more alluring and meaningful than a chore; it’s like driving toward destiny, like crafting my part of the conversation, like being “me” in a more articulate and clever way than I seem to manage in real time conversation. Unfortunately, getting to this flow, this ice sliding on the hot stove, this weightless joy of the pool, is a state the vast majority of writers do not achieve, not in middle school, high school, or even college.  Many do not realize this is even possible. Writing is a chore, a forced activity, a foreign environment, a lonely place between you and a teacher who you may or may not like and who may or may know really know you. It is a cold, chlorinated place surrounded by a pocket of hot humid air and distant noises, conversations you will never hear or understand and that have nothing to do with you.  That is writing for too many middle and high school and even college writing students.
This is not “flow,” nor is it an affinity space, another term that jumps to mind as relevant. James Paul Gee’s idea of affinity space suggests that classrooms should be more like clubs, organizations for the purpose of interacting over and developing common interests.   In an affinity space, everyone can contribute, even take the lead; both individual and co-created knowledge are respected and used; participation in multiple forms is available; and everyone is in it for the challenge and fun, making a communal sort of “flow.”  A recent article in The Atlantic about Finland’s school success makes a similar point, that an educational system that values cooperation, equity, and creativity will be more successful than one focused on competition and incessant testing. (See “What Americans Keep Ignoring about Finland’s School Success” by Anu Partanen.)
Gee also offered two ways of educating the young, first, acquisition, which occurs in natural settings such as the home, and second, learning, which takes more concerted effort and occurs in external settings like school. Neither is better, and both are important, but many disadvantaged students come to school without the kind of experiences with literacy acquisition that would have set them up for greater success in school—experiences like being read to; playing word games; discussing stories, characters and themes; talking about stories as living things where characters, incidents, and even settings might have gone in different ways for varied reasons, and if they had, what would have happened and why?  Those are the kinds of questions some children come to school having heard and answered…but too many do not bring this sort of preparation.
That last point fits with my writing-as-pool-like-environment metaphor. Less successful students tend to see text, whether a pre-K fairy tale or a college chemistry text, as external, and in the latter example, worrisome, daunting, intimidating, and to be avoided.  These students don’t have experience interacting with text, losing themselves in it, questioning it, deriving ideas from it. Some kindergarteners show up to school having been a part of such interactive immersion and others have not.  It is clear those who have had such experience of text as environment enjoy a huge advantage in scholastic literacy.
What then can be done for those who come to school without such literacy acquisition experiences?  I visualize a Venn diagram of two categories of enrichment, but it is a Venn with such a complete overlap to be a total eclipse.  These two categories are writing as a social activity and authenticity. The more students share their in-process writing with one another and the more they share their completed writing with people outside their classroom, the more authentic, meaningful, and motivating it will be for students, the more they will take pride in their work and strive to make it as clear, correct, and compelling as they can.  Below, I offer not so much tips for improving student writing so much as activities that facilitate membership, citizenship in literacy, that joy of being in one’s element that the swim coach’s son enthused over in that interview….that belongingness… that being confident and active in the environment of text. None of these activities will be new to literacy instructors, but based on what I hear from my students, such activities are not common enough in the K-12 world. These activities include:
In process sharing: Students collaborate in workshop circles where they take turns reading aloud drafts with a few classmates with the goal of coming up with questions and discussion that will help the writer make the story better—clearer, with a stronger connection between point and evidence, more interesting, more focused, more aware of and responsive to an audience of peers.  I tell my students that this is similar to comedians trying out material before sympathetic audiences before taking it on to a more daunting audience where the stakes are higher.  Here, writers use audience to help them choose between ideas when they cannot decide on their own; to give the writer a place to articulate an opinion about their own ideas; to use audience to help student writers see their work evolving through the confusion, laughter, and concern reflected back from others; and to use audience reactions to find what is working and how to make it even better and what is not working and how to make it work. As much as possible, teachers should lead discussion of “What is good?” in writing and the “how I got here” of process to provide venues for more successful students to show the way and to articulate for themselves and others how they negotiated the process and found success with their writing.
Students can also benefit from sharing low-stakes writing with one another, for example, journal entries they feel comfortable sharing.  They can also work together on writing projects, such as skits or plays they would later perform. They can combine writing with other expressions and other subjects, to write songs, to write letters to the editor, to write in imaginary historical voices, to write varied accounts of one story by different characters, to use a variety of ways to enter text, to create it, to analyze it, to play with it, to use it as environment and not task. 
Post-process sharing: There are a variety of ways students can share their finished work with others, and all of them can motivate students to write at a higher level than they otherwise might if their only audience was a teacher and the only consequence was a grade.  Sometimes we think students are nothing more than academic capitalists, and the only carrot that interests them is a good or acceptable grade. In writing, however, we have the solidity of words on paper, words that may, for example, tell a story of a meaningful person, so why not share that story with that meaningful person? When one of my Basic Writing students writes a strong essay about a relative or other consequential person, I encourage them to print out a fresh copy and share it with that person, to take the essay from the classroom and make it real in the world.  When they do, both writing student and their subject discover the true power of writing.
At the recent National Council of Teachers of English conference I attended, I saw a high school English teacher and a middle school language arts teacher from the same school district show and describe the online portfolios that their students created. The students chose a few pieces of writing from the year and organized them and added photos, colors, and other graphics and created an online space for their work where family and friends could go online and read the students’ work—again, this sharing with audience confers authenticity on the effort in a way that a mere “A” grade cannot do.
Another example: a Basic Writing colleague has an assignment where students must write something with the end goal of publishing it—a letter to the editor, participation in a department reading, or publication in a department textbook, etc.  The department that I teach in, Basic Writing in Developmental Programs at The University of Akron, is particularly proud of two opportunities for public sharing that we offer our students: a late semester public reading of excellent essays by the authors and a custom-published text book where a committee of instructors chooses excellent student essays submitted by students to be published for the next year’s text.  Students like both the motivation that they can be published and the relevance of reading essays by students just like them.
 It is essential that words and ideas and full shareable pieces become real for students growing as writers.  Writing is not mere school assignment or mental exercise; this is an environment just as surely as that pool was for the swim coach’s son. Even though this environment may first seem chilly and intimidating, with a little tossing of self into this new environment, and with helpful company there to question and encourage, it becomes a place where writers at any stage of development could happily find a second home.