Thoughts on Publishing

While reading Kirby this week, I was confronted with something I didn't want to think about as a teacher: publishing. Publishing has always seemed inaccessible; you publish novels or screenplays, or scholarly articles in scholarly journals. I got into teaching to stay away from publishing and scholarly journals. I had never considered using publishing in the classroom. However, what I read in Kirby changed my mind. 

Why publish student work? Well, why not? It's the final step in the writing process, and it means that someone besides the teacher will be able to read what the student has created. It gives the writing an existence outside of the school vacuum. "Skipping it (as traditional assignments often do) conveys the message that what we're doing with this writing in school doesn't much matter to real people"(206). In order to make the work real, and give it new sets of eyes, teachers should be publishing their students' work.

Kirby lists ways to publish, from small class displays to school-wide journals. There are some ideas of hers I like more than others, and some that I can picture being much easier to implement as a first year teacher. I definitely want to start a class blog. It's so easy to do, and would give students and the adults in their lives a chance to see their writing on a relatively secure spot of the internet (nothing on the web is ever completely secure; I have no illusions about that). I could start a Blogger for the class, have the students take turns being the blog's "curator" and making posts about what we've done each week, and then post bits and pieces of student's work. Kirby's got a great suggestion about what to pick out of students- "select good writing, even if it's only a sentence or two with a vivid image, an unusual twist, or the surprise of humor"(207). this way, all students will get a chance early on in the blog to get published. The class blog is an easy way to get kid's work seen by more than just me.
Another good idea, also incredibly easy, is the display board. Each room has a display board or two and I, as the teacher, get full control over it! (It's nice to have SOME control over something). I can see this being a perfect place to display student writing. For one, kids will feel acknowledged, knowing that I've read and appreciated their work. Two, they know their peers are looking at it too, hopefully boosting some confidence. 

Lastly, in Kirby, I loved this point he makes about why publishing student writing is important: "Human beings, not robots, produce writing" (206). It's a well-established fact that students don't have enough time for creativity in school, but producing writing is one of the most creative tasks. They need a place to be creative, to produce something unique and meaningful, that they might not be getting from the scan-tron tests in science or equations in math. Writing is a human activity, and it needs to be acknowledged as such, and teachers can easily celebrate this by publishing student work.