Memo #5

          At this point in my research,  I am wondering if I want to focus more on the teacher survey responses or the governmental policies that teachers have to abide by.  I think both are extremely important and in many ways they go together, but I previously wanted to focus on the specific laws and cases.  I think this is evidence of my project reaching out and becoming more of an experience rather than a typical research paper.

          I am surprised with the turn out of my teacher surveys in two ways.  First,  I am a little upset that I only received four responses after sending 180 emails out to various teachers.  I did hope that I would gather more responses, but I am super impressed with the honesty and experience that I received in the four responses.  Of the four, there was only one account of an administrator or parent censoring the student's work, but I learned a number of strategies for helping students take risks in their writing.  I also noticed a number of "self-censorship" instances where teachers had students avoid certain topics so that the work would not be challenged.  

          I wish that I had more surveys from teachers, because it would offer more evidence of censorship in the classroom.  At the same time, perhaps censorship doesn't happen as often as I had imagined it did.  The evidence that I gathered from the teacher surveys was very helpful to me as a future English teacher and I'm glad that I was able to collect the data.  

          I wonder if I should keep or abandon the student's view of censorship.  I think it is great to offer both the teacher and student side, but I wonder if I will be able to focus on both in the same project.  If I had done student surveys, I could have offered more support to the article as there is not much information about censorship from the student's point of view.  I would also assume that the majority of students that I would talk to would have little or no experience with censorship in their educational career, especially based on the teacher responses. A teacher has 100's of students a year, but a student only have 10-20 teachers in high school.  

          The question that I am now wondering is whether or not teachers are holding their students back by giving them limitations on their papers.  Is there a way to have students focus on hot topics but still treat the situation carefully and maturely?  How will I encourage students to take risks in their writing, after reading ideas from other teachers? 
  

Memo #4

          Unfortunately, I have not held an interview yet so my post will be a little strange.  I did schedule a meeting with an English teacher for the end of this week so I will edit/update this post (or make a new post) to explain the process and address these questions better.

           I have, however, started sending out emails with my survey attached to random High School English teachers across the U.S.  So far, I have received three responses (two from Alaska and one from Florida).

          Here are the results from my survey:

How do you encourage students to take risks in your classroom?

-I used to require a 15-min journal entry a day, I also require students to write about half a page before any class discussion (as it greatly enhances the quality of discussion)

-I run writing workshops with 3-5 selected papers that are nameless (names are removed) the students all take the papers home, read them and write feedback to the writers.  Then we sit in a circle and read each paper and discuss how to improve them. Also we write 3 days a week, after testing we get to poetry which encourages more risk taking.  Students are required to submit a piece of writing for publication or to a writing contest once per semester.  

-Students write every day with different parameters, once a week they write in creative writing notebooks, three times a week they respond to prompts with opinions or analysis of a passage.

Have you ever put limitations on student's writing? (If yes, what?)

- If students need to swear to be authentic or realistic to the situation in which they are writing about, they can swear.  Depending on the assignment, I remind students to be aware of the audience and look at tone, word choice and style accordingly. Also word limits, either over 500 words, or under 500 words.  

-With research papers yes, I will blacklist certain topics that really can no longer provide solid balanced, researched arguments (ex. gun control, abortion - media sensitive topics).  Much less limitation with creative writing.  Remind students of what audience they are writing for.  I encourage students to write about "hard things" those topics that people are afraid to write about.  I get some very good writing from those topics, but it does take courage sometimes.

-I won't accept racism, sexism, or homophobia in student writing or speaking.  Certainly we can talk about these issues, but not in ways that insult or disparage others.

Has a parent/administrator had a problem with student work?  If yes, what happened?

-A student wrote about a teacher that had been fired and jailed for inappropriate behavior with students and how it impacted her.  She wanted to submit the essay to a writing contest so the principal read it and asked her to make it more anonymous and the paper was given to the legal department of the district. 

These answers were great and exactly what I wanted to know about.  I found the last story very important and I am glad that the student wasn't held back but rather legally bound to remove all names.  It would have been easy for the teacher and principal to say "no, this is not appropriate", but they all stood behind the student!