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Pedagogy 5.2 (2005) 357-360



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Finding Commonalities in a Sea of Difference:

A Rhetorician Discovers New Worlds of Writing in Katie Wood Ray's The Writing Workshop

[Works Cited for Roundtable]
The Writing Workshop: Working through the Hard Parts (and They're All Hard Parts). By Katie Wood Ray (with Lester Laminack). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001.

I'm always suspicious when I receive something in the mail from Jonathan Bush. He seems like an upstanding guy and a real scholar, but he works at a university in the "flyover" part of the country. You know, that flat expanse of nothingness between the East Coast and the West Coast. Even worse, he works over in English education. You know, that mysterious (and probably flat) place where, rumor has it, one of the many things they do is train new teachers of writing. He has always been a bit odd. When we would talk in graduate school about rhetorical theory, he would always mention some shady character from English education who had said the same thing, only in clearer prose. I've been trying to tell him for years that we have absolutely nothing in common. Sure, we went to graduate school together and played on the same intramural basketball team. Sure, we had many of the same classes and read many of the same books and articles. But when it came time to focus our work for our dissertations, Bush went over to the dark side—English [End Page 357] education—while I wandered ever deeper into the heart of rhetoric and composition.

Yet he sends me a package.

In this package I find Katie Wood Ray's The Writing Workshop: Working through the Hard Parts (and They're All Hard Parts), a book for elementary and middle school teachers on how to teach writing. "What on earth could elementary school teachers of writing have in common with college teachers of writing?" I wonder. The answer, it turns out, is quite a bit.

Both Ray and I share a commitment to writing as a process, and both of us agree that students learn best when they have the opportunity to become fully invested in their own projects. Ray writes that the process she has in mind is not a linear, neat, easy to condense into a worksheet kind of process, but a messy, uncertain, chaotic process that each student must live (or, in Ray's words, "do") in order to develop as a writer. The focus of the writing workshop, then, must be on "writers who use writing to do powerful things in the world in which they live" (5).

To get students to do these powerful things, Ray says writing workshops must give students the freedom to choose their own topics, the time to write during class, the opportunity to talk about their writing and receive feedback on drafts, and the chance to publish their writing for broader audiences. Teachers must think of their teaching in new ways. They must give up the total control of always teaching from the front of the class and, instead, move out among writers and teach them in small groups, or one-on-one, all in response to their needs as they arise during their work on a project.

Surprisingly, this looks a lot like what happens in my advanced and professional writing courses. For example, in my Writing for the Web course, students propose the clients we will work with for their major projects. Class time includes plenty of workshop time when students can work on their sites. All Web site materials go through a series of reviews and user tests before they are delivered to the clients. All of our Web sites are published on the World Wide Web by both the students and the clients. My teaching in this class looks like Ray's writing workshop as well. I present a minilesson at the beginning of the period, then move out...

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