What exactly are students doing in school?

What exactly are students doing in school?

Posted on April 6th, 2018 by Scott Warnock

Gore Vidal once said, “Heroes must see to their own fame. No one else will.” So, with all due respect to the Aeneas’s and Odysseus’s of the world, I’ll use this opportunity to tell you about the release of my new book, Writing Together: Ten Weeks Teaching and Studenting in an Online Writing Course, which I co-authored with former Drexel student Diana Gasiewski.

The book relates the dual narrative of an online writing course I taught and Diana “studented” (more on that word in a moment) a few years ago. As we describe in the introduction, Diana subsequently took two other courses with me and worked in the Drexel Writing Center, where we sometimes discussed teaching writing in general and online writing instruction (OWI) specifically.

As I write in my part of the introduction, I had had an idea for the book many years ago, when I was thinking what might follow from my 2009 book, Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. But any new publication, I believed, had to include the student voice. In talking to Diana, I thought maybe we could write an article or chapter. She expressed interest, and I asked if she’d send me brief notes about our course. Instead, she dropped over 6,000 words on me!

At that point, I thought, “Maybe there’s a bigger project here.” The publisher I approached, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), had the generous foresight to agree.

I’m very proud of the book we wrote. Sure, as I’m telling my friends, it may not exactly be the book you’re going to take the beach this summer. It is primarily aimed at college teachers who teach writing in online settings — or are planning to. Teachers at other levels might be interested.

But there may be other audiences as well. Because Diana so clearly and articulately writes about our course, students who will take an online class might take a look. And you know who else might care?: The hundreds of thousands of parents whose children may take a course like this in the near future.

Just sayin’.

The student voice is big here. In fact, we need to hear the student voice more in education in general. That’s where the word “studenting” came from. We have the word “teaching,” but we don’t have a word that captures the experience of being a student — “learning” is certainly only one part of it. In that regard, the impact of the book, I hope, may be wider than just the OWI world. Because the reality is, we don’t have a good sense of exactly what students are doing in the schools they attend.

We, the big, collective “we,” do a terrible job of capturing what a school is like, so of course we have little idea of what our children’s experiences are like. We think some schools are “better” than others based on… well, what? Well-manicured campuses? High test scores? Good football teams? Juicy endowments? Cool sweatshirts? Test scores? Climbing walls?

In our evaluations, we often don’t think much about the self-selected populations in entire schools or parts of schools that would have succeeded no matter what. We don’t consider how, especially in college, a student’s experience is often shaped by individualized, micro encounters with a few friends and colleagues and an even smaller number of teachers/faculty. We don’t understand how to represent that.

I hear versions of the question “Is it a good school?” asked of everything from pre-K through college to graduate programs.

Based on what?

We don’t know what the daily experience of a student should be, so it is difficult if not impossible to imagine what a specific student’s, your student’s, experience will be like.

Our book tries to show in great detail what an online writing course was like that term. It’s a narrative.

Scaling the idea of narrative to broader educational assessments is complex, but imagine if we evaluated schools and educational settings by spending time — and it takes time — talking to students, teachers, administrators, members of the community. Sitting in the rooms. Seeing and hearing what happens.

Perhaps this seems impractical, but I think it’s remarkable how unnuanced our current approaches are, as they depend on flat metrics and data sets. In our intro, Diana mentions how, in her efforts to see if I was a good teacher, all she really had to depend on was RateYourProfessor!

Of course, the “data” Diana and I generated about our class was time intensive. Not every student is going to write a book about their experience in school. Diana was an exceptionally talented person and a strong writer who was well-suited to this project because of not only that talent and writing ability but also a background in education and writing center work.

Still, in general, we could generate a smarter approach to schooling by digging in deeper to the experiences of the people who live and work there.

What’s a school like? The reality is: We often have little idea. But we could, my co-author and I think, do a much better job if we more regularly asked the students!

Author Bio
Latest Posts

Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.