What Is Teaching and Learning?

I have written a few times in this space about how my dissertation applies Roland Barthes’s concept of “writerly” texts to teaching and learning. In my dissertation, I focus on online courses, partly because it is an easier for people to grasp the theory applied to fixed online course materials than a live classroom, but I feel very strongly that the advantages of writerliness can apply equally well to both environments. That my PhD is in Instructional Technology also played a part in my online focus.

What attracts me most to Barthes’s vocabulary of the “writerly” is that I believe that virtually every course, whatever its intended focus and content, should also be designed to build skills that are vital to academic and professional success, of which writing could be said to be the most important.

However, writing, reading, and thinking are intimately related activities that all involve the construction of meaning, and the better students can learn to process and organize new information, the better they will be able to integrate it with their own accumulated experience, and thus to translate any text into a meaningful experience, into an opportunity to construct (or write) their own new meanings.

The purpose of education should always be to help students become better readers and writers, not only of their textbooks and lessons, but of all manifestations of the language that shapes the world around them.