I use an ecological model of writing to teach students to be flexible writers.

I believe in an ecological model of writing, which acknowledges the broad range of literacy experiences within the systems individuals inhabit and adapt to as developing persons, and as writers (Varty, 2016). This has strong implications for almost everything I do as a teacher of writing. It informs how I think about literacy, and how I teach students to be nimble writers who can appropriate and compose writing in and across contexts. It shapes my belief that writing is a creative and recursive process, one that is as unique as the writers who engage in it, and that it can be approached using various strategies that can be taught. It is the umbrella under which all my classroom practices congregate.

An ecological model of writing also implies that a writer’s purpose is as important as the audience that they are writing for, the language choices they make to reach that audience, and the genre they are writing in. Thus, rhetorical flexibility, reflection and linguistic justice form the foundation of my writing classes. This allows for a dynamic integration of multiple modalities as students practice reflecting on their own linguistic resources drawn from their writing ecologies, their aims for communicating in a given rhetorical situation, and the strategies that will work best for them to compose for various audiences.

My main goal in any writing class is to see my students grow as writers. Because an ecological model of writing attends to a diversity of linguistic experiences that can shape writers’ approaches to rhetorical situations, I facilitate this growth first by establishing a safe and strong classroom-community, where I am consistent and transparent in framing expectations. This makes room for attention to metacognition, the celebration of diverse life experiences, and ultimately a rich site for collaboration and peer review. Before leaving my classroom on any given day, students will have had the chance to discuss, read, write, move, listen, and work in small groupss. Students have the opportunity to engage with the recursive process of writing through discovering and reflecting on their own writing processes, through feedback from myself and their peers, and through opportunities to publish and present their compositions to real audiences.

The audiences I prepare students to write for are dependent on their purpose as writers within a given rhetorical situation. Therefore, I endeavor to introduce students to a variety of rhetorical situations for which they plan and compose writing. Ranging from online audiences, to formal academic audiences at conferences, to community partners, the audiences shift and change throughout our 15 weeks together. This is intentional, as it allows writers to reflect on how their own writing processes and products shift and change in different contexts. It also emphasizes the importance of flexibility within one’s writing ecology and the necessity of genre awareness. Students are asked to be agile writers who can communicate clearly and meet a variety of expectations.

Another important goal that I set for every class I teach is that my students grow as human beings. This purpose is served through the various pedagogical strategies mentioned in the previous paragraph, but it is undergirded by my belief that I should teach and my students should learn from an “undivided self” (Palmer, 1998). I am not just teaching a room full of one-dimensional writing students, but of humans who have rich and full lives—families, other college courses, jobs, children, and other experiences—that form key areas of their writing ecologies, informing their engagement with myself and the course material. Understanding my students and these diverse personal contexts as holistically as possible helps me to more effectively teach them, and also helps us all make meaning together as a community of writers.

Because I believe that writing improvement happens through writing practice, formative “process” assignments, as well as multiple drafts, metacognitive journals, peer review and conferences are all ways I can efficiently and accurately assess this improvement. Students in my classes use writing to learn and also to demonstrate learning. Throughout any given semester, students are assessed in their writing process improvement, but nowhere is this more effectively demonstrated than in the end-of-semester portfolio, which includes several writing samples, as well as a reflective essay. In evaluating student writing, my belief is that exceptional writing demonstrates appropriate genre conventions, rhetorical awareness, and a strong sense of voice. In order to produce this kind of exceptional writing, understanding one’s writing ecology and using a diversity of linguistic tools with rhetorical flexibility are key. These strategies will be evident in a successful piece of writing in my classes.

Built on an ecological model of writing, my classrooms are lively communities where we practice improving our writing processes, and where writing is evaluated and assessed in stages, culminating in a variety of writing products appropriate for the contexts in which they are composed.

Palmer, P. J. (2017). The courage to teach (20th ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Varty, N. G. (2016). Ecological awareness: Enacting an ecological composition curriculum to encourage student knowledge transfer. Wayne State University.