Mother Tongue

"Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan is one of the examples of meaningful reading materials that our ex-office staff turned professor Jorge Villalobos has used to facilitate student voice in his freshman comp classes. At a NCHEA3-sponsored PD event on Friday, Villalobos shared his success with an approach called "recycled writing" whereby his students start out with writing a narrative about a memory and progress to composing a thesis-driven expository essay. He showed that when we involve students in meaningful reading and writing tasks, they no longer offer one-sentence or very generic responses. Instead, the experiences they had and the desire to share can be a defining factor in how we engage the learners.