RIWP Conference

What makes you you?  For me, it’s my personal journey in becoming an English educator.  One of the major destinations is to see my future students create the beginning of their own journey’s narratives.  But before they are able to decide just what it is they want out of their journey, they need
an ever expanding imagination.  I want to believe that their imagination will begin to emerge with the press of the pencil to the paper.  In America, at least, the English language dominates the sphere of consciousness and to be able to fully express a student’s uniqueness they first need to learn the joys and complexities that come with the English language.  Broadly speaking, the more they are able to write what’s on their mind, the better prepared they will be to visually and vocally express their wants and needs—their thought process.

Academically, students will need to be proficient in the art of writing: narrative, informative and argumentative.  As Tom Newkirk says, writing intertwines between these three categories of writing.  And in fact, the best kind of writing comes from those that are able to interchangeably utilize these categories to convey their purpose to the reader—be it their peers, their educators, their friends and family, employers, etc.  To that extent, English educators become the centerfold of a student’s journey in discovering what they want, want and need.  What can make the difference between a continuation of wanting to learn what could potentially pull a student from a slum of reality block—not knowing what they want to do in life—and simply coming to that stand still is being able to express their inner most desires.

At least that’s what I believe.

Independently speaking, students should be able to express what they want, want and need.  Similarly, they’ll need to be proficient in the art of writing: narrative, informative and argumentative.  Admittedly, when I read a text from a close friend that lacks in any of these categories of writing, I initially think it to be a dull piece of reading.  And even more so, if they are speaking to me in such a manner, I will tend to do the back-up-slowly-until-they-get-the-hint-I-no-longer-what-to-be-a-part-of-this-conversation walk.  Even if a student is writing in a Writer’s Journal, a Diary, a Journal or a B-log, for their own sake and no one else, they are attempting to entertain their own mind.  They want to grab the interest of the mind to keep on writing.

At least that’s what I believe.

So what exactly gets a student to the stage in their career where this is automatic, habitual, almost as if the art of writing has always been a part of them, alongside expressing their thought process?  The answer to that is an educator and an educator’s memorable style.  Style, as I’ve come to discover, is a multi-layered technique where the educator conveys what they know to their students.  Another major destination in my personal journey as an English educator is to uncover as many layers as I can in style so that I can eventually develop my own style when I finally enter the field as the centerfold.

At least that's what I believe.