Personal Essays: Spoken and Written

By Fred Haas, HS English Teacher

Aggregated Dashboard of Student Blogs

Over the course of the year, my grade nine English sections have been migrating from writing personal narratives to more academic essays. As part of the transition, I asked my classes to write essays that were more personal in nature, providing the students with authority and confidence over their content.

Since these kinds of essays would be about them individually, they need not worry about being wrong in any way and the instruction could be more focused on how to construct and craft essays in a way that is engaging and powerful. To open the semester, students wrote essays that were statements of personal belief or values.

National Public Radio used to run a segment called “This I Believe,” which has since grown into a non-profit organization. Using the rich database of essays from the organization as models, students wrote essays inspired by a belief or value that guides their lives. Using this approach, the students immediately empowered as the content experts about what they chose to write.

All of the students having laptops in classroom enabled a deeper and richer set of experiences. Over the course of the year, students have routinely made use of the laptops for writing purposes. While simply writing with computers is a lower level of laptop usage, it simply serves as an entry point for a deeper writing experience. As part of the process, students collaborated with each other in reader response groups to give and receive feedback to each other in preparation for revision. Using Google Docs as a platform for their group collaborative efforts, students were able to easily share, while reading aloud, their work, preserve comments and feedback from the session’s multiple real-time participants embedded within the actual actual writing, and immediately begin the process of revising their work.

Additionally, these essays, by design, are meant to be written for a real audience, including not only peers but the public-at-large. As a result, blogs became the platform of choice for sharing. The blog now serves as a hub of public, digital work. In fact, all of the student blogs are aggregated by section for easy access on this dashboard. Classmates now respond to one another by leaving comments. Additional comments are welcome. Each student presenting their work on a blog introduced yet another opportunity to learn and employ a new tool into the overall process, all in service of literacy.

Using blogs also created a chance to discuss some basic aspects of how websites work, what makes data searchable, and how to combine media into a single, cohesive work. Moreover, introducing the concept tags or metadata, and applying it to their own content, will prove a seedbed for later research work.

Considering that the inspiration for this assignment was a radio segment, the opportunity to give voice to the essays was a natural enhancement to be included. The laptops afforded instant access to sound recording and editing tools for the vocal readings, software like GarageBand or Audacity. Students then used SoundCloud to store and play their edited audio on their blogs. This small addition of the recorded vocal reading by the student writer is an advantage, in terms of preserving a performance and linking spoken and written language in a way that provides a deeper and richer literacy experience.

Of course all of these individual activities could have been completed in analog fashion. In fact, apart from using a blog as a central hub and distribution platform, all of these tasks predate widespread computer use. Yet, the whole is worth more than the sum of individual parts. They were charged with wrestling with an array of tools and concepts and rendering a product. Plus, students were able to work and create quickly, building on multiple iterations. It is a very clear example of learning by doing.

Ultimately, students explored the connection between spoken and written language in a subtle but powerful way, developing pieces of writing that are deeply personal, powerful, and authentic. They wrote for themselves, their classmates, and the public-at-large. Even better, some even remarked that it was fun.