By Federico Navarro and Andrea Revel Chion
Entering high school implies immersing oneself in communication and knowledge-building practices in the disciplinary areas. While the privileged medium for teaching, learning, studying and discussing them is undoubtedly writing, in secondary school writing tends to become invisible, to be taken for granted, to restrict itself to spontaneous literary creation, to take refuge in the language classroom, to become a mere instrument of evaluation. Given this, how can we integrate school writing into the programs of the different subjects? How can we take advantage of its power to access the epistemological frameworks of the disciplines? How can we explicitly teach the school texts and language resources that are needed in the classroom? How do we provide tools to teachers to incorporate school writing in their teaching practice? And how can we help students understand the impact that writing has or can have on their learning?
This book addresses these and other questions from an innovative institutional proposal, the School Writing Program, which critically adapts the approach to writing across the curriculum for the initial and advanced courses of a secondary school in the City of Buenos Aires (Argentina) since 2011. The space is run by an expert writing teacher who collaborates during each academic term with a different subject-area teacher in a two-way training process. Both aspects common to school writing and disciplinary specific aspects are worked on from the creative and regulated rewriting of texts: basic literacy skills, meta-skills, school discursive genres, ICT and regulations. The authors discuss early results that showed a positive impact on both students and participating teachers.
