Writing about and of literature. PTs need to know how to foster writing about literature, drawing on their knowledge of current writing pedagogy related to constructivist uses of writing to learn.  This involves knowing how to create writing assignments that foster engagement and critical analysis of texts through informal writing (freewriting, journal writing, online chat, mapping, listing, drawing) and formal writing (essays, reports, PowerPoint presentations). 

     Students often have difficulty going beyond, extending, or elaborating on their responses.  To help students extend their responses, teachers could model various other strategies included on this list.   They may also ask students to provide reasons for why they are responding in certain ways, why, for example, they are upset with a character or believe a story will end happily.   Or, they could ask students to infer what a text means to themselves--their own personal meaning, and what it means to the world--larger implications for others. For example, Phyllis Edwards of the Santa Cruz school district gives students categories for writing in their journals such as: “what it says,” “what it means,” “what it means to me,” and “what it means to the world.”

    They may also create activities in which students are responding to and creating multi-genre texts—texts that consist of a range of different types of genres--reports, poems, letters, diaries, stories, advertisements, field notes, photos, drawings, etc. (Romano, 2000).   Connecting these disparate genre types requires the ability to determine how different types of texts yield different perspectives on the same topic or phenomenon.

    In altering texts, students are engaging in “culture-jamming” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004) associated with adopting a critical stance on the original meaning of texts. In creating Adbuster-like parodies, students are critiquing the intended positive meanings of ads through altering the ad images and language.

    In combining texts, students are also learning to communicate in multimodal ways through how they combine print, image, and audio texts. This requires that they consider how their language, images, or audio serves to illustrate, augment, extend, or interrogate each other. For example, a group of four African-American 8th grade females constructed a multimodal PowerPoint presentation that portrayed different images of poverty and homelessness in their community (Mahiri, 2006). 

    PTs may also have students respond to literature using blogs, wikis, and podcasts, tools that allow for interactive sharing of responses with peers, as well as collaborative writing.  Teacher educators may model the uses of these digital writing tools in their methods classes so that PTs develop examples of digital writing for use in modeling uses of this writing with their students.

    PT’s may evaluate students’ writing in terms of their ability to employ certain types of interpretive strategies or critical lenses, as well as the amount and quality of their self-assessment and revision.

    PTs can also help students understand literature through having them write their own stories or poetry.  Learning to use descriptive details or dialogue to portray characters or events helps students understand how writers employ literary techniques to convey meaning.  Or, or writing poetry, students learn to use titles, voice, figurative language, rhythm/rhyme, or white space, uses that enhance their ability to respond to poetry.

Further reading on writing about and of literature:

Anderson, J. H., & Farris, C. R.  (Eds.).  (2007).  Integrating literature and writing instruction.  New York: Modern

    Language Association.

Atwell, N.  (2003).  In the middle: New understandings about writing, reading, and learning.  Portsmouth, NH:

    Boynton/Cook.

Davis, R. L., & Shadle, M. F.  (2007). Teaching multiwriting: Researching and composing with multiple genres, media,

    disciplines, and cultures.  Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

DiPardo, A., & Schnack, P.  (2004).   Expanding the web of meaning: Thought and emotion in an intergenerational

    reading and writing program.  Reading Research Quarterly, 39(1), 14-37.

Gallagher, K.  (2006).  Teaching adolescent writers. Portland, ME: Stenhouse

Gaughan, F., & Khost, P. H.,  (Eds.).  (2007).  Collaborating, literature, and composition: Essays for teachers and writers

    of English.  Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Graham, S., MacArthur, C. A., & Fitzgerald, J.  (Eds.). (2007).  Best practices in writing instruction.  New York: Guilford

    Press.

Gordon, E., McKibbin, K., Vasudevan, L, & Vinz, R.  (2007). Writing out of the unexpected. English Education, 39(4),

    326-351.

Langer, J. A.  (2001). Beating the odds: Teaching middle and high school students to read and write well.  American

    Educational Research Journal, 38(4), 837-880.

McIntosh, J. (2006).  Enhancing engagement in reading: Reader response journals in secondary English classrooms. 

    Language & Literacy, 8(1).  Retrieved July 22, 2006 from http://www.langandlit.ualberta.ca/Winter2006/McIntosh.htm#

Knights, B., & Thurgar-Dawson, C.  (2007).  Active reading: Transformative writing in literary studies.  Continuum

    International Publishing Group

Sipe, R. B., & Rosewarne, T.  (2006). Purposeful writing: Genre study in the secondary writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.