Teaching Ought Imperatives

description of the writing process and its relationship to your own writing process, is to encourage you to promote writing in its social contexts, as a means for individual and social growth, development, and change. Since the acquisition of knowledge is not a simple matter of passively taking in data-knowledge is always actively constructed and transformed in use---{;ritical thinking teachers must present their discipline-specific knowledge in terms of its applications inside and outside the classroom for students (see Geisler, 1994; Herrington and Moran, 1992). Teaching only the modes of discourse or forms of argument or the research paper does not equip students to participate as active, critically literate citizens, nor does it enable them to understand how to apply critical thinking and argumentation skills in future situations. Instead, it casts students into roles of passive instruction followers, writers who produce only what they are told to produce, using only a limited range of forms and having little understanding of, or practice with, the ways that contexts and conventions affect writing and reading. Thinking of writing in terms of the social contexts helps us recognize further that writing instruction is an ongoing process and the responsibility of faculty members in all departments. Although formally trained composition instructors may be better able to offer sustained and effective instruction in writing, all faculties have both the knowledge and the obligation to help students learn the writing skills necessary to participate in the myriad disciplinary discourses they will encounter. Understanding how you write (and we're assuming that writing is a social process for you, embodied in your interactions with colleagues, family, co-researchers, and reviewers) is a key to understanding and developing empathy for how your students write. It is also the key to teaching them the modes, manners, and conventions of communicating in any given field. Teaching writing, in other words, is not just a matter of teaching students how to edit academic English (which is what happens when you emphasize surface-level errors in grading). Writing involves the process of inquiry from start to finish, and modes of inquiry vary from field to field. In the critical thinking classroom, we're assuming that part of teaching students how to think critically is using writing to engage students in complex thinking about significant and developing in students the habits of mind so that they become personally engaged with problems in any given situation, beginning with your course (Bean, 1996, p. 28). In the next section, we'll detail several ways this can be accomplished. Informal Writing Assignments The writing activities we describe in this section are not necessarily concerned with a final product as much as they are with capitalizing on the early stages of the writing process to assist students in identifying, exploring, and developing insights about particular problems posed by the teacher or, in due time, the students themselves. These kinds of writing activities are typically known as informal writing assignments, because they focus on the exploratory, thinking-on-paper