In an effort to internationalize the country’s education system, it is quite relevant to pose questions like the following: What contributions do our scholars in the field of literacy and our teaching practitioners give to foster literacy development among young generations? What intellectual legacy have our senior scholars passed on to their juniors in attaining an international recognition?
Thanks to our scholars’ strong commitment to boosting literacy in the country, a relatively large number of research on literacy (for example, writing) has been undertaken, generating important insight into how writing pedagogy in the country can be improved.
A number of studies in the field has been conducted in the local context (Indonesia), with some having been presented in national and international conferences, and published in anthologies as well as local accredited and international journals.
While this painstaking endeavor should be lauded for the light they throw on writing pedagogy, many of such studies are more concerned with the curricular design of the teaching of writing, writing instruction in school and students’ written products.
As such, these studies ignore the importance of understanding the process of how written by-products come into being and how students behave while writing. The discursive and intricate process of writing student writers are experiencing cannot therefore be overlooked as information obtained from this process can serve as a useful guidance for curriculum design, teaching instruction, and the treatment of written products.
As a teacher-researcher of some 12 years dedicated to composition teaching, I find it revealing to spell out what the students expect from their writing teachers, and what strategies they employ as they are trying to struggle to grow as a writer.
Using a variety of methods (class observation, students’ reflective essays, field notes and an informal interview), I manage to document students’ voices as follows:
First, students demand that writing teachers relinquish their roles as ones who have authority over their texts. Exercising too much control over their texts severely limits their ways of communicating.
Students desire writing teachers be their counterparts and interested readers rather than a corrector or an omniscient judge of their writing.
Second, students cannot simply accept teachers’ remarks that often accuse them of lacking sensitivity toward standard writing conventions adopted from writing textbooks. Discouraging remarks, the students say, can increase apprehension to writing, making them fear taking risks, which is a necessary part of the writing process.
Third, students want their teachers to be flexible in imposing writing strategies on them and to respect their individual strategies. Rigid application of rules is counterproductive and can create writing blocks, which psychologically inhibit students’ writing growth.
Personality factors, linguistic maturity, preferences to using and rejecting certain writing conventions and styles all affect the extent to which individual students employ certain writing strategies.
Finally, students demand they be given room to negotiate the conflicts they face. They want to be treated as individuals that have the right to question, resist and challenge writing conventions, which are often at odds with their intellectual tradition, identity, culture and value.
These diverse voices show that the classroom is not only an important site for research exploration, but a site for an intellectual engagement among teacher-students and student-students. Though locally situated, insights generated from this exploration certainly have far-reaching implications on our writing pedagogy.
By accommodating these voices, teachers can not only treat student writing with respect, but they can hopefully be, to borrow Henry Giroux’s coinage, a transformative intellectual.
Many studies are more concerned with the curricular design of the teaching of writing, writing instruction and students’ written products.
The writer is an associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University and chief-editor of the Indonesian Journal of English.
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