Writing Relationships / Edition 1

by Lad Tobin

Overview

In the ideal composition class of the 1990s, everything seems to run smoothly: all learning is happily collaborative, all authority is successfully de-centered, and all students are part of a conflict-free community of writers. No student is ever bored or boring, angry or provocative, and no teacher ever responds in ways that are self-serving, subjective, or idiosyncratic. Since most books and articles on the teaching of writing describe the ideal as if it were the norm, many teachers feel embarrassed by what does or doesn't happen in their own classrooms- and envious of what they believe is happening down the hall.

Writing Relationships goes beyond the idealized talk about what should happen in "process" teaching to examine what actually occurs: competition and cooperation, peer pressure and identification, resistance and sexual tension. This book is about how interpersonal relationships — between teacher and student, student and student, and teacher and teacher — shape the ways that teachers read and grade their students' writing and the ways students respond, or don't respond, to their teacher's suggestions.

Through narratives and case studies, the author demonstrates that much of the tension, confusion, and anxiety associated with a process approach is inevitable and, in part, desirable. But this book is more than a series of failure stories: the author gives teachers specific and useful ideas and strategies for :

• reading student essays
• responding to student writing
• leading a discussion of an essay
• running a writing workshop
• grading
• setting up peer and co-authoring groups
• conferencing
• publishing in the field.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780867093223
Publisher:	Heinemann
Publication date:	03/25/1993
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	156
Product dimensions:	5.87(w) x 8.87(h) x 0.36(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lad Tobin is an assistant professor of English at Boston College where he directs the first-year Writing Program, trains graduate assistants, and teaches composition and composition theory. He is author of Writing Relationships: What Really Happens in the Composition Class (Boynton/Cook, 1991) and Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the '90s (Boynton/Cook, 1994). His articles on the nature of interpersonal relationships in the writing class have appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, To Compose (Heinemann, 1989), and Vital Signs 2 (Heinemann, 1991).

Table of Contents

How Classroom Relationships Shape Reading and Writing
The Teacher-Student Relationship
Reading Students, Misreading Ourselves, and Vice Versa
Responding to Student Writing (I): Productive Tension in the Writing Conference
Responding to Student Writing (II): What We Really Think About When We Think About Grades
Teaching a Composition Class: Combine and Conquer
The Student-Student Relationship
Competition: Beyond the Rhetoric of Collaboration
Modeling: The Power of Identification and the Identification of Power
Collaboration: The Case for Co authored, Dialogic, Nonlinear Texts
The Teacher-Teacher Relationship
Voices in My Head, Fairy Tales I Still Believe, and Other Topics Not Fit for Academic Discourse

Editorial Reviews

. . . perhaps the most significant and powerful realization to date of teacher research . . . . Tobin exemplifies teacher research at its best.”–College English

From the Publisher