Teaching ELA in the 21st

     When we first discussed the writing coach work we would be doing with high schoolers, I was extremely excited. I could finally get the chance to interact with (although virtually) students in high school and get to see their writing. Also, I could think about coaching them and working together on growing their writing, which seemed a lot less anxiety-inducing than the prospect of eventually assigning a grade to students' writing. This experience has been just as exciting as I had imagined then, although I do have a limited amount of writing to base my opinions on for this blog post. Unfortunately, I have only received writing from three students, all of whom were writing the same "reading response" format. I have heard from most of my students in some form or another, although I have not received any drafts of their writing. Of course, I totally understand why some other circumstances have prevented these students from being able to send me their drafts; this just me...

The use of technology in the classroom has drastically changed throughout my time in school; yet, surprisingly, how it was used in English classes has not. The first time I recall using technology in an English class was in middle school when we would read weekly Achieve3000 articles on our individually issued Chromebooks and answer the questions associated with them. In high school, we would occasionally use the Chromebook cart to do research as part of the frontloading process of a new unit. Also, we would typically spend a day in the computer lab typing up the final draft of a paper. The only time technology was ever a part of composing was during the occasional PowerPoint presentation. When I think about how integral technology has become today, especially considering the shift to online composing and submission in the context of Covid-19, it is wild to think about how little my high school prepared me for education in the context of technology and multimodal production. In college...

           When I reflect on my process of writing, I think about how far I have come in accepting that writing is an ongoing process.  In high school and the early years of college, I saw writing as something that should be planned out in order to effectively communicate an argument, be written, and then be submitted. I went through the steps of the Stages of Writing Model  that Flowers and Hayes describe in their "Cognitive Process Theory of Writing." By following these stages so rigidly I often forced myself to stick to what I had planned in prewriting and did not allow myself to explore radically new ideas in the rewriting process. It was not until I assembled my Final Portfolio  for English 233 at UWM that I reflected on how these rigid steps of writing were preventing me from growing. At the end of the portfolio, I reviewed my writing process of the past and how I began to change the way I viewed my writing while preparing the portfoli...

 Kimberly Winston      I am a third-year undergraduate student majoring in English Education at UWM. It was my freshman year of high school while reading Lord of the Flies when I first truly discovered a passion for the English and Language Arts subject and began envisioning myself one day teaching. The journey from then until now has given me many opportunities to grow as a writer and reader. I particularly enjoy papers that are about works of fiction because I love seeing how students can uncover the author's motive behind the work of fiction. In my writing, I am currently focusing on incorporating creative nonfiction writing into my life because that is one area of my writing that I can definitely improve on. I hope that becoming more comfortable in expressing the reality of our world through nonfiction writing will give me greater opportunities to impact those around me. When it comes to writing online, I have some experience but I definitely also have room to g...

My Experience with Digital Literacy By the time I was born in 2001, our world was already emerging into the greatest technological advancement our world has seen. Looking back on my childhood, technology seems almost inseparable from my younger years. In elementary school, I became obsessed with the Warrior Cats  series by Erin Hunter and I remember using the family iPad to look up websites that posted about the characters and events of the series. Eventually, I began writing my own version of the Warrior Cats and I started several versions of stories that I would never finish. My interactions with fan fiction through the fandom websites that I had found gave me my first introduction to my own style of creative writing. As an adult now, I envy the creative freedom that childhood me had and am constantly searching for a new way to revive the spark that I had then.  These days, I feel like a consumer of the world around me and I am constantly searching for a way to revive the in...