Reflections on Chapters 4 and 5: Connecting Reading and Writing

Reading to write refers to the idea that the best writers are the best readers. I still like what Hirvela calls “mining”. As he suggests, students in writing classrooms should be looked at and need to be taught to be “miners”, “explorers” and “invstigators” mining for gold and valuables, exploring the unknowns and putting the bits and pieces of a certain “writing crime”. The “gold”, as it were, in not only content but also “linguistic, stylistic and rhetorical conventions”. In this regard, I really appreciate the “writerly reading” discussion and I would suggest the “readerly writing” dimension as well. It is through writing that we develop our reading, through reading that we develop our writing and through writing that we develop our writing. We develop as writers by actually writing, and by that I do not mean the actual writing but rather all that it is comprised of: writing, feedback, revision, pre-writing, re-writing and so on.

I also like the writing-classroom Collaborative and Computer-Assisted Models discussed by Hirvela. The blog entries we do on a regular basis in this class ands a few other classes are inevitable since they entail reading and writing. Through this “virtual”, though very real, world, we develop ourselves and others through negotiations and conversations. As for the Collaborative Model, it seems that in such a collaboration-savvy world, it is easy to take for granted how “collaborative” classrooms, and writing classrooms in particular, have truly become, and it is for that reason that countries in the “third world” are forgotten on the other side of the collaborative divide, so to speak, as is the case with the digital divide. In “traditional” classrooms, the teacher is the ultimate and only authority, source and center of information, whereas in collaborative classrooms students as well become producers of knowledge as well. The interaction will be three way (teacher-student, student-teacher and student-student).