Blog #10

I definitely agree that we have read many complex texts this semester. There were certain texts which I struggled with or re-read sections of, especially some of the supplementary articles assigned. However, I also agree that some of the texts were more helpful than others.

The three texts from the course readings which I feel were most useful to me are Peter Elbow’s “High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing,” McLeod, Miraglia, Soven, and Thaiss’ WAC For the New Millennium: Strategies For Continuing Writing-Across-The-Curriculum Programs, and John C. Bean’s Engaging Ideas.


I found Peter Elbow’s “High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing” to be useful to me because I had read this article once prior to this class and again at the time it was assigned for this class. After reading it that second time, with a little more context and background knowledge, I feel like I better grasped the concept of writing to learn as a whole. I believe it was a great introduction to the idea of writing to learn. I also believe that it was really useful in the sense that it described the distinction between and importance of both high and low stakes writing assignments quite clearly. In addition, it provided us with helpful suggestions concerning how to respond to each form of writing, along with additional useful suggestions for classroom implementation. Overall, I found this article to be practical because it applied directly to what I will be doing in the classroom, without any extra and unnecessary information. This article will affect my pedagogy in the sense that I am now better informed on ways to respond to both high and low stakes writing.

I found the selections we read from McLeod, Miraglia, Soven, and Thaiss’ WAC For the New Millennium: Strategies For Continuing Writing-Across-The-Curriculum Programs to be useful as well. Although I did not find this text as easily accessible as Engaging Ideas, I believe it had a lot of useful information to offer. I found Chapter one particularly useful. I found this selection of text very useful as an introduction to a topic which I had never heard of and knew nothing about prior to taking this course. Therefore, most of the first readings helped me understand its intentions and practices and were very useful, however, I find this chapter of the text specifically useful because it provides a clear context of WAC’s place in education today. This includes topics such as technologies’ place in and affects on WAC and the developing concern for WAC’s use with non-native speakers of English. This text has impacted my future teaching practices in the sense that I am now very aware of how large a role technology plays in WAC today and because I am now curious as to which writing activities are the best to implement WAC in classrooms which include non-native English speakers, which will best serve them.

I found John C. Bean’s Engaging Ideas to be the most useful text of the course readings this semester. I saw it as the cornerstone text of this course. I found the selections from this text to be most useful because of the fact that I also found it to be very accessible. I also found it most interesting to read of all the texts. I truly believe that the ideas found in this text get to the core of WAC. I found chapters three and four, “Engaging All Learners: Valuing Professional and Personal Writing” and “Dealing With Issues of Grammar and Correctness” most useful because these chapters went beyond theory and into practice. I did find the first two chapters interesting but not as useful to my future classroom practices as chapters three and four. Those two chapters address significant classroom practice issues. They provide important suggestions to common classroom issues such as accommodating student diversity and many useful suggestions on how to deal with grammar and correctness. I also found chapter five, “Formal Writing Assignments,” useful in the sense that it addresses designing problem-based formal writing assignments. This is not only a topic of interest to me, but also one of significance to the writing I may assign in my future classrooms.