RE: [xmca] FW: The Shadow Scholar - He writes your students' papers.

["White, Phillip" <Phillip.White@ucdenver.edu>]

Greg, you wrote:

snip
We, as educators, simply do not do justice when it comes to teaching
students to use multiple sources in primary and secondary school.

and 

I think though, instead of trying to catch plagiarism we need to teach
students to use multiple sources and introduce academic discourses much
earlier in education. It is the only way to stop the cycle of Colleges
claiming high schools are to blame and high schools laying the blame at the
doors of middle schools.
snip

having taught MA and PhD classes in education for the last twelve years or so, and for the last several years i'm also working with undergraduate students who wish to become elementary school teachers it has not been lost on me that many students are not fluent writers.

following my understandings of Gregory Bateson's theory of systems, i subscribe to the notion that an individual can't "change" a system, but an individual can change her/himself;

also, building on my understandings of Lave & Wenger's writings on legitimate peripheral participation & aprenticeship, not to mention Vygotsky's theories of learning as embedded in social activities and relationships;

and remembering my days in elementary education when kindergarten teachers would complain that parents weren't adequately preparing their children for school with the necessary skills for kindergarten;

i decided to build a strand of writer's workshop within classroom instructional time so that students working together in cooperative groups would jointly compose major written products that would be handed in at the end of the semester.  

and i could rove from group to group keeping my own monitoring notes regarding individual student progress to give me deeper understandings regarding students' strengths, weaknesses and instructional next steps.

for me, now, the issues of poor student compositions as well as ghost writers, plagiarism, etc., is now a non-issue.

what it took was a change in my identity and introducing different teacher directed activities.

my two-bits worth.

phillip



Phillip White, PhD
University of Colorado Denver
School of Education
phillip.white@ucdenver.edu

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