Justin M. Boucher
In recent years it has become increasingly important that social studies teachers be competent teachers of writing. Our standardized tests are often writing tests. Our course content relies heavily on reading and writing, but most of our training ignores the writing process in favor of teaching content. This focus also represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to teach social studies. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding results in deep and pervasive consequences for curriculum and teaching practice.
In my own teaching, I have experienced the consequences of content--centered social studies in a wide variety of social studies courses. District, state and AP curricula are all measured and paced according to content. This is the nature of the discipline, and in most cases it seems appropriate, but it leaves few social studies teachers with the tools or the time to directly address the nuts and bolts of reading and writing. Instead, we tend to nibble around the edges of reading and writing, teaching how to evaluate sources and how to find a main idea in a paragraph.
This problem is particularly acute in Advanced Placement courses. In addition to the large quantity of material required, the students have presumably demonstrated a high level of academic skill. Ideally, these two factors result in a fast--paced course in which students may have only a few classes in which to master complex topics. Even students will strong literacy skills can find the pace strenuous. As a result, finding meaningful strategies for improving student retention of information without sacrificing the need to cover all the material is a constant challenge.
Furthermore, even when the students retain the material, it is often so complex that many find it difficult to fully explain their understanding in written form. This difficulty arises from the taxing nature of the writing process. Linda Flower argued in her 1979 article "Writer Based Prose: Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing"that the process of composition places a huge burden on short--term memory. Thus as students are trying to compose sentences that convey their understanding of the material, they are limited by the capacity of their short--term memory . As a result, even students who have relatively high levels of understanding and knowledge might score low on a test because they cannot convey ideas through writing. Flower further argues that practicing the skills necessary for writing can reduce the cognitive burdens of composition. For our purposes, instruction and practice in writing would reduce the percentage of their working memory that is bound up in the writing process. This would free mental resources for use in learning psychological concepts of sensation, perception and cognition. There are, however, benefits to this connection between the writing process and the psychological content that go far beyond simply freeing up mental resources.
All my students have difficulty translating their understanding of psychology into terms that are memorable for them and fully comprehensible and convincing to others. Writing instruction would help students translate their reading into their own words, thereby making the material more memorable. It would also improve students' ability to convince others of their understanding of the material. Unfortunately, it will be difficult to justify taking much time away from content to remediate the students' writing skills. There is simply too much content to understand in a social studies course. This quantity of material does not diminish the need, but it does mean that the writing instruction must be offered through the content in order to ensure student mastery.
This unit addresses writing strategies as they mirror and as they support course material. The skills that are built within this unit will reinforce and be reinforced by the content. This is the basis of the reciprocal relationship between skills and content in most social studies courses. Furthermore, the skills that grow out of this unit will bear fruit throughout the rest of the course. It is my intention to teach this unit in the first two months of the course, allowing the students to assimilate a greater quantity of material throughout the year.
This unit adopts the understanding that writing is based in the process of seeing and knowing. The writing process begins with sensory experience, which for our purposes we will call seeing, even though it could just as easily be hearing or smelling. We take in the world, we see it, and that is the first step toward understanding it. We experience the world in momentary sensations and make split second judgments, which form the basis for our understanding of the world. This formulation of impressions is necessarily brief, given the number of experiences we have in a given day. It is also necessarily fluid, given how quickly these experiences change. And it is impermanent, given the limitations of our sensory memory. Nevertheless these fleeting images are the beginning of our understanding of everything. As a result, this system of experience lies at the beginning of the writing process.
The relationship between the psychological content and our understanding of the writing process begins with a link between the mechanics of sensation and the concept of seeing. Just as seeing in our writing process involves the formulation of impressions, the process of sensation deals with the ways in which our senses provide us with information from the bits and pieces of stimulation that bombard us every day. They last no more than a fraction of a moment and leave little more than a ghost of an impression on our consciousnesses. They are not even stored anywhere in our memory, as the term sense memory refers only to the split--second transmission of information through the nervous system to the brain. In fact the term sensation itself refers only to the moment when the brain becomes aware of an incoming message from the sense organs.
The next step in our understanding of the writing process is knowledge. Knowledge in this context can be used interchangeably with understanding, and it refers to our accumulated ideas. Though these ideas are also impermanent and fluid, they are more solid and less interpretive than the initial impressions of sight. They can be altered, modified and influenced by new information and new experience. Unlike experiences, they must bend and shift to fit our larger understanding of the world. Ideas are intentionally malleable, allowing us to create a larger picture of the world, rather than a fragmented series of images. Thus, all our ideas and knowledge begin as impressions of the world around us.
The very nature of these ideas, malleable and semi--permanent, makes it possible for us to deal with the real world. This structure of understanding allows us to conceive of a world that is not static. We can therefore interact with one another, interact with objects, and interact with those aspects of our world that we can change. This adaptability also presents a very real problem. In an ever--changing world, ideas are regularly discarded, changed beyond recognition and lost to the ravages of time. Furthermore, protean ideas, which have not yet solidified, can be easily lost in the melee of daily life. Nevertheless, the formation of knowledge with all its flexibility and faults is the second step in our understanding of the writing process.
The relationship between writing and psychology continues with a link between perception and knowledge. Just as knowledge involves the formulation of ideas, the process of perception deals with the ways in which we combine sensations and prior knowledge to create understanding of what is going on around us. When we perceive the world around us, we make split--second judgments about how pieces of data, sensations, and knowledge interact within the confines of our working memory. Our working memory filters these pieces of data. We form malleable ideas about what is going on that can easily be altered based on new experiences. Perception is also the beginning of our ability to tell a story about what is happening.
When we perceive the world, we create an account of what is going on. We combine smells, tastes, sounds and sights to establish relationships between various impressions. A steak has no flavor without its smell, just as a rose that looks like a pizza will smell like pepperoni. The process of perception is one of connecting one idea to another, one sensation to another and one understanding to another. Thus our perceptions and our ideas are often one in the same.
Only with experiences and knowledge can we progress to writing. When we look at seeing and knowing in this context, with experience leading to impressions and understanding leading to ideas, it becomes easy to understand the necessity of writing. Seen this way, writing becomes the chief means of solidifying and preserving ideas. To write something down is indeed to make it permanent. Each time we write down phone numbers and grocery lists, we remind ourselves of the permanent nature of writing and the impermanent nature of thought.
In this context however, writing is also a means of thought. It is a means of thinking about our knowledge that makes our thought processes visible and displays them to the world. In his 2007 article "Writing as Thinking,"Richard Menary argues that writing is a cognitive process that transforms our cognitive abilities
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. He further argues that the use of the external, permanent memory system that writing affords us allows us to change and manipulate ideas long after their initial creation. These possibilities infinitely expand our interaction with our own ideas and the ideas of others.
The curious nature of writing is that the process of putting thought into language and displaying it in a form that can be read and therefore recalled verbatim leaves us with a deeper understanding of the topic of our writing. It also makes the ideas we were writing about more solid than they were before and allows those ideas to become new experiences and new knowledge. Thus the process begins again, with the writer or the reader seeking new experiences, leading to more knowledge and an ever--increasing capacity to share and increase understanding.
Explicit understanding of the role cognition plays in writing and of the roles that sensation and perception play in cognition allows students to put each step of the process in its proper context. Students with a strong grasp of the psychology of cognition will have the necessary tools to evaluate their own understanding of the world. Thus, they will more clearly appreciate the process by which they filter information, think about it, and present it to others. This knowledge will allow them to be clearer in their writing and, as Flower suggests, devote less of their cognitive resources to writing.
Though Menary, Flowers, and many others have studied writing and thought, there is little research to be found on the relationship between psychological education and writing. Even so, it seems obvious that an understanding of the concepts enhances an understanding of the skills and that an understanding of the skills enhances an understanding of the concepts. As a result this relationship can be extremely useful in teaching both writing and psychology.
