Beyond Pop Culture: Helping Students Dig Deeper with Their Writing
What do Taylor Swift, The Hunger Games, and Snapchat have in common? The answer is: they’re all big in pop culture for teens and tweens. That makes them likely topics for papers, should you invite your students to write about what matters most to them. But are these topics going to require your students to dig deep? Will these topics inspire them to express themselves as only they uniquely can?
To explore this topic, I invited educator Vicki Davis to Studentcentricity. Vicki teaches writing. In fact, she’s passionate about it and is the author of Reinventing Writing: The 9 Tools That Are Changing Writing, Teaching, and Learning Forever.
Vicki told me she wants her students to “wow” her and that typically can’t be done with subjects they can simply Google. Nor is she likely to get them to “wow” by simply instructing them to write about whatever they want.
I encourage you to listen to our discussion. During it, I asked:
– if it’s wrong to try to steer students away from pop culture, when we know how vital choice is to intrinsic motivation;
– if “digging deeper” referred to doing more research, or to writing from the heart about personal issues;
– about writing prompts;
– how to encourage more meaningful writing;
– how to help students struggling with writing; and
– what constitutes “wow” to a writing teacher.
When I was a kid, when instructed to write about a place, I chose Switzerland. When instructed to write about a person, I chose Albert Schweitzer. Granted, there was no Google at the time but there were encyclopedias. And as worthy as Switzerland and Schweitzer were, if I’d had a teacher like Vicki, I would have had to choose topics much more meaningful to me. I would have had to dig deeper, and the writing experience would have been that much more compelling. And if digging deeper could make writing more significant to me – someone who loved to write – imagine what it can do for the kids who don’t necessarily see the point of it.
You can — and should! — listen to Vicki’s thoughtshere.
Additional resources:
The Unstoppable Writing Teacher: Real Strategies for the Real World by Colleen Cruz
Teaching Adolescent Writers by Kelly Gallagher
This episode ofStudentcentricity was sponsored by Turnitin’s Revision Assistant.Learn how to make teaching good writing easier…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_dQoo0PiBks%3Frel%3D0%26showinfo%3D0
2 comments
Comments are closed.
Related Articles
Listen on These Podcast Platforms
Latest EDwords Articles
Three Words Early Childhood Educators Should Never Use to Manage Their ClassroomsMarch 21, 2024
What Visible, Measurable Effect Is GenAI Having on Student Learning? We Asked John HattieMarch 17, 2024
It’s Here! March, “National Reading Month!” Let’s Read!March 2, 2024
Keep Your Head Up: Learning to Survive As an Early Childhood EducatorFebruary 25, 2024
Singing and Moving in a Developmentally Appropriate ClassroomFebruary 12, 2024
Rae this is so important! We must somehow find a way to get kids to love writing as much as we do. I think once they see it as a way to express themselves and a way to create, then they will jump in. The podcast with Vicki was great and she has so many good suggestions for making writing fun.
Jon, that’s exactly right: kids have to see writing as a way to express themselves — in the same way they might write music or create a game or make something! Otherwise writing becomes just another thing the teacher is making them do.