TEACHING WRITING

OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM

What does it mean - “teaching
writing outside the classroom”?
Basically, it means getting your
students out of the classroom
(in the schoolyard or in a nearby
park) and start teaching them
the usual writing techniques!

Just kidding, don’t leave! 

 “Writing outside the classroom” refers to all the situations
(outside the classroom) in which our students make use of
their writing skills (handwriting or typing):

 Blogs
 Text messages on their phones
 E-mails
 Posts on social sites (including tweets  )
 Comments to quotes or pictures, on sites/blogs
 Articles for online magazines
 Diaries
 Poems
 etc
 Other terms used:
 “extracurricular writing”
 “out-of-school writing”
 “writing in students’ home cultures” *

*found in “A Policy Research Brief produced by

the National Council of Teachers of English” ,on
http://www.ncte.org/
 “Studies conducted during the past two decades
have shown that students bring to school many
resources or “funds of knowledge” that remain invisible
in the classroom. Students who show little engagement
with school-based writing can be highly motivated by
out-of-school writing projects, developing skills and
insights that remain unknown to their teachers.”

Knobel, M. (2001). “I’m not a pencil man”: How one student challenges our notions of literacy
failure in school. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 44, 404-414
 The important question is…
Can we, as teachers, control/ manage
their writing acts outside the classroom?

Mission: impossible

And yet…
 We can use certain “tools” to encourage
out-of-school writing that we can control,
such as:
 Class discussion groups
 Facebook groups/project groups
 Online homework sites
 Project sites
 Shared documents on Google drives
 Online questionnaires
Facebook project group
Homework site
Online questionnaire
Discussion group
Student blog
Advantages of extracurricular writing:
 Improving the students’ typing skills
 Making the students more aware of the different
types of online readers
 Giving the students the opportunity to express
their thoughts in informal
circumstances/contexts
 Giving the students the opportunity to analyze
other students’ pieces of writing
 Offering/receiving feedback outside the
classroom
 Disadvantages of extracurricular
writing:
 The students may be reluctant to writing
on the suggested sites/groups
 Some of their ideas could be too open-
minded for the context
 The students might be offended by the
feedback they receive from their readers
and refuse to cooperate
 Their handwriting will not improve 
 Online resources:

 http://wic.oregonstate.edu/news/teaching-writing-online
-writing-learn-outside-classroom
 http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journa
ls/CC/0191-sep09/Chron0191BriefWriting.pdf
 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1038&context=tips