|
Plain Talk about Learning and Writing across the Curriculum 1987 Soft Cover
Plain Talk about Learning and Writing across the Curriculum 1987 Soft Cover
Virginia Department of Education
1987 Spring
Soft Cover
162 Pages
This is a book of stories and conversations about what goes on in classrooms. It sets out to capture the shared intentions of teachers and students as they engage in the mutual enterprise of learning. It might appear to be a book about writing in schools, but all the contributors see writing as a mode of thinking, and they are concerned to describe the part writing can play in the process of each student's independent learning. We hear the voices of some twenty teachers of different subjects as they write-in the first person-about their classrooms. We also hear the voices of their students as they too write-in the first person-about their learning in mathematics and history and science and English. In the course of the narratives and conversations, these teachers comment on their aims, their changes of perception, their discoveries, their failures and their successes; and we follow their growing realisations that writers' intentions are prior to their need for techniques.
In times past, reading was the highly esteemed province of the educated and the powerful; writing was a lowly skill performed by hired scribes for practical purposes only. Much of this view lingers today. People see writing as necessary for the practicalities of daily life. They use it as seldom as possible. To see it as an aspect of thinking is as unbelievable as seeing a genie coming out of a bottle, yet, studies in the last fifty years exploring the relationship of thought to language have shown writing to have a transforming power over thought which is little short of magical. "Thought is born through words" wrote Vygotsky. This book is an account of classrooms where teachers are struggling to bring to birth and develop their students' thinking, through spoken and written words.
The teaching described in this book is linked in a number of ways with the work we carried out in the 70's in the London Writing Research Project (outlined in Section Two). We set out to devise modes of analysis of students' writing by means of which the development of writing abilities might be documented. To do this we needed to construct a theoretical model of the relationships between kinds of writing and their contexts. We were, in effect, looking at the written language as a whole, of which reading-including literature-is the obverse of the process of writing, and an inseparable part of it. We made a distinction between writing for practical purposes and writing to create 'verbal objects.' The product is the purpose of the latter and is comparable with the products of the other arts-something is made and worked upon for its own sake-stories, poems, plays. That is to say the writer is making something with language rather than doing something with it. Such verbal objects are also thought products; are themselves 'arguments' couched in an alternative mode to the practical, and are no less transformed by the art of writing than are those other practical writings which are directly concerned with information and argument. These last are the main concern of the book.
All pictures are of the actual item. If this is a railroad item, this material is obsolete and no longer in use by the railroad. Please email with questions. Publishers of Train Shed Cyclopedias and Stephans Railroad Directories. Large inventory of railroad books and magazines. Thank you for buying from us.
Shipping charges
Postage rates quoted are for shipments to the US only. Ebay Global shipping charges are shown. These items are shipped to Kentucky and then ebay ships them to you. Ebay collects the shipping and customs / import fees. For direct postage rates to these countries, send me an email. Shipping to Canada and other countries varies by weight.
Payment options
Payment must be received within 10 days. Paypal is accepted.
Terms and conditions
All sales are final. Returns accepted if item is not as described. Contact us first. No warranty is stated or implied. Please e-mail us with any questions before bidding.
Thanks for looking at our items.
| 
