ETEC 540- Forum Post: Writing Changes Everything
Throughout this course, I found that the posts that were being made by my classmates were consistently of a very high quality. This may have been partly due to the fact that this particular course was carried out in a Wordpress environment instead of within Blackboard. All of our discourse was very formal and scholarly. Each time that I was preparing my own contributions for the weekly discussions, I felt an intense pressure to produce content that matched the high quality of my classmates’ posts. I have chosen this forum post as an artifact of my learning because the work of Ong (1982) had quite a profound impact upon me. The invention of writing and oral language before it had far reaching implications in human history that I had not previously considered. Through these readings and the discourse that unfolded as a result of them, I came to gain considerable insight into the evolution of writing, while also reflecting on how this new learning could and should influence my own practices in my literacy programs. The following is my post based on the discussion question given below.
How has the technology of writing changed the act of teaching?
When the advent of writing resulted in a shift from oral cultures to literate ones, the way in which humans thought changed substantially. Because of this change in human thinking, the way in which educators taught changed substantially too. The existence of writing did not replace or mean the end of oral communication though. Literate people did not stop their face to face conversations in order to write down their thoughts on paper and pass it on to the person they were communicating with. Both written and oral communication still play a great role in society and in current educational settings. The importance of oral communication skills can still be seen today in our curriculum documents. For example, in the B.C. IRP documents oral language (including speaking and listening), writing, representing, reading and viewing make up the curriculum organizers. The technology of writing has changed human thought processes and consequently, the act of teaching as well.
When working with children, it becomes apparent very quickly that there is an incredibly large difference between asking a child a question and having them respond to you orally and asking a child a question and having them respond to you in written form. The bulk of the students that I work with if given the choice, would prefer to share their answer orally (one on one, not in front of the whole class). Prior to reading some of Ong’s book ‘Orality and Literacy,’ I had mostly attributed this student preference to the fact that these students felt like it was more work to write their thoughts down than to share them aloud. It is not uncommon to hear students say ‘Can’t I just tell you the answer instead?” After reading chapter three of Ong’s book, I am reassessing my thoughts on the matter. Writing enables us to ‘know’ in a different way than oral communication does, thus writing must also require us to think in a different way to produce written work.
One of the greatest allowances afforded by writing that became apparent to me while reading ‘Orality and Literacy’ was the ability humans gained in regard to self-reflection. Writing provided humans with the opportunity to mull over their ideas more deeply at a later time. According to Ong, “[w]riting establishes in the text a ‘line’ of continuity outside the mind. If distraction confuses or obliterates from the mind the context out of which emerges the material I am now reading, the context can be retrieved by glancing back over the text selectively” (Ong, 1982, p. 39). Prior to the existence of writing, anything put into words was easily lost as “the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered” (Ong, 1982, p. 39). Unless an idea was rehearsed and processed to the point of being stored for retrieval, oral individuals would have had very little opportunity to assess complex problems, or analyze situations without a tangible record of thoughts, events and past experiences to draw from. The physical act of writing also provides humans with more time to think as it forces the mind to slow down and reorganize the oral information into a written expression (Ong, 1982, p. 39).
As an educator, I constantly draw upon this ability to record ideas and examine them more thoroughly once they are written on a page. I encourage the use of this process in my classroom when we are completing problem solving tasks. Initially, I must teach the students how to organize their thoughts in order to help them identify and use what they know to arrive at a viable solution. I often utilize graphic organizers and other strategies to help students see patterns in their recorded information and to enable them to make generalizations or draw their own conclusions. This type of thinking is something that an oral individual would be unable to do. Working with young learners, or students with learning delays has allowed me to experience the ‘concrete’ learning stage in which students think things through at a very basic and literal level. Students in this category are often unable to think in abstract ways in order to analyze or infer from a given situation. Ong refers to this same quality in inhabitants of oral cultures when he discusses the phenomenon of ‘situational’ thinking. Situational thinking involves arriving at an answer to a question based on real life situations that the individual has actually ‘lived.’ What is outside of their realm of experience, does not factor into their reasoning process. Individuals living in oral cultures struggle with formal logic and consequently are troubled by the thought processes required to work through a syllogism (Ong, 1982, p. 51). Luria’s findings though as cited by Ong indicate that even weak literacy skills alter the way people’s minds think. Luria notes that ‘a barely literate’ man is able to apply the ‘rule’ of a given syllogism to arrive at a conclusion, but he does so in a way that allows him to disown himself from the answer, as is apparent in the way which in the man phrases his answer as follows: “To go by your words…” (Ong, 1982, p. 51). Findings such as this indicate that the presence of even minimal text in an individual’s life begins to alter the way in which they process thoughts.
There are so many interesting ideas shared in Ong’s work, but I have essentially only focused on the aspect of writing that allows us to record ideas so that we can at a later time return to them to review, share them with others, reflect upon them and use them for personal growth. I have focused on this one aspect for a specific purpose. This is an aspect of writing that is relevant to me both personally and professionally. When I am working through an idea myself, more often than not I pull out a piece of paper and record my thoughts upon it. If I do not do this, the words will continue to roll around in my head (often interfering with other thoughts or my ability to fall or stay asleep) until I record what I am thinking. This is how my brain works, and although I know this is not the case for all literate people, I am sure that it is a byproduct of living in such a text rich world. Professionally, I do a great deal of reflection with my students and this often involves writing. I have my students make goals and commit them to paper. We treat this goal writing kind of like a contract. If it is something that you feel strongly enough to record in writing as a goal, than it is something worth working for. As I previously mentioned, writing is a huge part of our problem solving activities. I also use it for conflict resolution. I have a graphic organizer set up similarly to a comic book layout. There are two people in each box on the page and they both have a speech bubble and a thought bubble above their heads. We use this when we are trying to arrive at a solution when a conflict has arisen between two (or sometimes more) students. I sit down with the students who were involved in the conflict and we talk about what happened. First, the students are expected to record what was said by themselves and the other student(s) involved in the speech bubbles on the graphic organizer. Sometimes they realize that what they think they said was not what the other person actually heard. The second step is a little more challenging, as the students are also expected to record in the thought bubbles what they were thinking while the conflict was taking place. The act of writing these spoken words and personal inside thoughts down on paper usually helps the students work through the conflict and improve their understanding of the situation. It also teaches students about empathy by having them consider the perspectives of others. Via the act of writing, they are forced to slow down their thoughts, take a step back and reflect upon what took place with a little more distance from the situation. Although this process does not work for all students, it works for many. This ties in well with what Ong posits about the act of writing allowing the author to organize their thinking in “analytic kind of linear sequences which can only be set up with the help of texts” (Ong, 1982, p. 58). It is this quality of writing that allows literate people to closely examine the cause and effect in a given situation. Ong states that writing allows us to, “structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience’ (Ong, 1982, p. 42). Writing gives us the distance that oral communication, which must by nature stay ‘close to the human lifeworld” (Ong, 1982, p. 42), simply cannot provide.
References:
English Language Arts Kindergarten to Grade 7 Integrated Resource Package (2006), Ministry of Education, British Columbia. Retrieved from http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/pdfs/english_language_arts/2006ela_k7.pdf
Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen. Retrieved from http://occupytampa.org/files/wcom/ong%20walter%20orality%20and%20literacy.pdf
When the advent of writing resulted in a shift from oral cultures to literate ones, the way in which humans thought changed substantially. Because of this change in human thinking, the way in which educators taught changed substantially too. The existence of writing did not replace or mean the end of oral communication though. Literate people did not stop their face to face conversations in order to write down their thoughts on paper and pass it on to the person they were communicating with. Both written and oral communication still play a great role in society and in current educational settings. The importance of oral communication skills can still be seen today in our curriculum documents. For example, in the B.C. IRP documents oral language (including speaking and listening), writing, representing, reading and viewing make up the curriculum organizers. The technology of writing has changed human thought processes and consequently, the act of teaching as well.
When working with children, it becomes apparent very quickly that there is an incredibly large difference between asking a child a question and having them respond to you orally and asking a child a question and having them respond to you in written form. The bulk of the students that I work with if given the choice, would prefer to share their answer orally (one on one, not in front of the whole class). Prior to reading some of Ong’s book ‘Orality and Literacy,’ I had mostly attributed this student preference to the fact that these students felt like it was more work to write their thoughts down than to share them aloud. It is not uncommon to hear students say ‘Can’t I just tell you the answer instead?” After reading chapter three of Ong’s book, I am reassessing my thoughts on the matter. Writing enables us to ‘know’ in a different way than oral communication does, thus writing must also require us to think in a different way to produce written work.
One of the greatest allowances afforded by writing that became apparent to me while reading ‘Orality and Literacy’ was the ability humans gained in regard to self-reflection. Writing provided humans with the opportunity to mull over their ideas more deeply at a later time. According to Ong, “[w]riting establishes in the text a ‘line’ of continuity outside the mind. If distraction confuses or obliterates from the mind the context out of which emerges the material I am now reading, the context can be retrieved by glancing back over the text selectively” (Ong, 1982, p. 39). Prior to the existence of writing, anything put into words was easily lost as “the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered” (Ong, 1982, p. 39). Unless an idea was rehearsed and processed to the point of being stored for retrieval, oral individuals would have had very little opportunity to assess complex problems, or analyze situations without a tangible record of thoughts, events and past experiences to draw from. The physical act of writing also provides humans with more time to think as it forces the mind to slow down and reorganize the oral information into a written expression (Ong, 1982, p. 39).
As an educator, I constantly draw upon this ability to record ideas and examine them more thoroughly once they are written on a page. I encourage the use of this process in my classroom when we are completing problem solving tasks. Initially, I must teach the students how to organize their thoughts in order to help them identify and use what they know to arrive at a viable solution. I often utilize graphic organizers and other strategies to help students see patterns in their recorded information and to enable them to make generalizations or draw their own conclusions. This type of thinking is something that an oral individual would be unable to do. Working with young learners, or students with learning delays has allowed me to experience the ‘concrete’ learning stage in which students think things through at a very basic and literal level. Students in this category are often unable to think in abstract ways in order to analyze or infer from a given situation. Ong refers to this same quality in inhabitants of oral cultures when he discusses the phenomenon of ‘situational’ thinking. Situational thinking involves arriving at an answer to a question based on real life situations that the individual has actually ‘lived.’ What is outside of their realm of experience, does not factor into their reasoning process. Individuals living in oral cultures struggle with formal logic and consequently are troubled by the thought processes required to work through a syllogism (Ong, 1982, p. 51). Luria’s findings though as cited by Ong indicate that even weak literacy skills alter the way people’s minds think. Luria notes that ‘a barely literate’ man is able to apply the ‘rule’ of a given syllogism to arrive at a conclusion, but he does so in a way that allows him to disown himself from the answer, as is apparent in the way which in the man phrases his answer as follows: “To go by your words…” (Ong, 1982, p. 51). Findings such as this indicate that the presence of even minimal text in an individual’s life begins to alter the way in which they process thoughts.
There are so many interesting ideas shared in Ong’s work, but I have essentially only focused on the aspect of writing that allows us to record ideas so that we can at a later time return to them to review, share them with others, reflect upon them and use them for personal growth. I have focused on this one aspect for a specific purpose. This is an aspect of writing that is relevant to me both personally and professionally. When I am working through an idea myself, more often than not I pull out a piece of paper and record my thoughts upon it. If I do not do this, the words will continue to roll around in my head (often interfering with other thoughts or my ability to fall or stay asleep) until I record what I am thinking. This is how my brain works, and although I know this is not the case for all literate people, I am sure that it is a byproduct of living in such a text rich world. Professionally, I do a great deal of reflection with my students and this often involves writing. I have my students make goals and commit them to paper. We treat this goal writing kind of like a contract. If it is something that you feel strongly enough to record in writing as a goal, than it is something worth working for. As I previously mentioned, writing is a huge part of our problem solving activities. I also use it for conflict resolution. I have a graphic organizer set up similarly to a comic book layout. There are two people in each box on the page and they both have a speech bubble and a thought bubble above their heads. We use this when we are trying to arrive at a solution when a conflict has arisen between two (or sometimes more) students. I sit down with the students who were involved in the conflict and we talk about what happened. First, the students are expected to record what was said by themselves and the other student(s) involved in the speech bubbles on the graphic organizer. Sometimes they realize that what they think they said was not what the other person actually heard. The second step is a little more challenging, as the students are also expected to record in the thought bubbles what they were thinking while the conflict was taking place. The act of writing these spoken words and personal inside thoughts down on paper usually helps the students work through the conflict and improve their understanding of the situation. It also teaches students about empathy by having them consider the perspectives of others. Via the act of writing, they are forced to slow down their thoughts, take a step back and reflect upon what took place with a little more distance from the situation. Although this process does not work for all students, it works for many. This ties in well with what Ong posits about the act of writing allowing the author to organize their thinking in “analytic kind of linear sequences which can only be set up with the help of texts” (Ong, 1982, p. 58). It is this quality of writing that allows literate people to closely examine the cause and effect in a given situation. Ong states that writing allows us to, “structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience’ (Ong, 1982, p. 42). Writing gives us the distance that oral communication, which must by nature stay ‘close to the human lifeworld” (Ong, 1982, p. 42), simply cannot provide.
References:
English Language Arts Kindergarten to Grade 7 Integrated Resource Package (2006), Ministry of Education, British Columbia. Retrieved from http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/pdfs/english_language_arts/2006ela_k7.pdf
Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen. Retrieved from http://occupytampa.org/files/wcom/ong%20walter%20orality%20and%20literacy.pdf