Writing+to+Live

Wilson, Lorraine. //Writing to Live: How to Teach Writing for Today's World//. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2006. paperback.

Lorraine Wilson’s book, “Writing to Live,” is a thoughtful and useful guide for any teacher of writing who celebrates democracy and community-involvement and seeks ways to engage our students in the curriculum. Wilson, an education consultant in Melbourne, Australia, also authored a book in tandem, “Reading to Live.” In both of these guides she focuses on the importance of using a curriculum that reflects the values of our children, the beliefs of their community, and that allows them to write and read about what matters to them the most. Wilson contracts her reader’s attention immediately by opening her book “Writing to Live” with the following quote by Randy Bomer:

//“If we want to live in a world that is fair, we have to make sure that the literacies we enact in our classrooms can contribute to a just world. If we want to live in a world of freedom, then our students must learn how to communicate and reason as free people.”// In “Writing to Live,” Wilson addresses specific ways to help students become engaged and aware citizens in their communities and thereby active in the writing that supports their concerns and awareness. She demonstrates thoughtful writing instruction through examples of exercises and projects that she used in her own classroom. Through these exercises, students find their voice, demonstrate concerns, express opinions, seek questions and find justice. Though most of the exercises in the book were developed for middle-level learners, one can surely find possibilities for transferring the ideas to any level of writing instruction.

For example, in Wilson’s second chapter on //Writing Critically,// the students learn this skill of critical writing by first learning about critical //reading//. By implementing this type of reading practice exercise by systematically analyzing advertisements, books, television shows, and more, students are able to better understand social and political facets such as gender roles, consumerism, visual rhetoric, etc.; they can then can transfer the new knowledge and their developing opinions into writing for their own critical or inspirational reasons. The entire process helps the student identify issues, develop opinions and then finally learn how to effectively express those opinions in order to garner results or change. Wilson refers to this type of practice as “critical literacy,” whereby a program works “toward a worldview of social justice and participatory democracy.” It is also a practice where the topics the students choose can be open-ended as they are always invited to add-to, change, alter or vary their writings as they learn new information or change their opinions.

Chapter five of “Writing to Live” is also loaded with practical classroom applications for helping our students learn more about their world through learning their language, and vice-versa. The chapter opens with a quote by Jeffrey N. Golub who said that writing—in addition to using it for communication and transmission of information—is “a way of organizing out thoughts, of figuring things out, of making meaning of our experiences and our ‘fragile thoughts’.” Wilson demonstrates how to use various exercises in the classroom so students can simultaneously learn about writing language while learning about the language itself. The process consists of a stream of exercises that begins with tapping into existing knowledge, then acquiring new knowledge, and finally processing and making connections between the existing and new knowledge. After the series is complete, students will be able to apply and evaluate on their topic(s) endlessly, acquire and categorize new knowledge, and make further connections.