Weaving Workplace Writing into the English Classroom

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

not so much whether English teachers should bring some workplace reading and writing into the curriculum, but how to do so in an already overcrowded curriculum. In this article I suggest some ways that we might weave workplace literacy into the existing fabric of the classroom without displacing the important things we teach now. Boiarsky advocates that secondary school English teachers reduce the quantity of traditional literary works and expressive and imaginative writing in order to make room for workplace English, both by cutting these from the curriculum and by handing content over to other subject areas (97). I believe that such an approach could both trivialize English and render its goals overly narrow. Teachers reach a more reasonable compromise when they teach a unit or two of workplace literacy during the school year, but new workplace units must take the place of other potentially valuable units that were previously taught. While workplace literacy units may better balance the kinds of reading and writing that students do in English language arts classes, they may also gobble up valuable time and, by getting attention only periodically, even marginalize workplace literacy. I suggest that rather than replace valuable content and learning experiences already in the curriculum with workplace training, we can instead draw on the functions of workplace documents to support the work we routinely do in the classroom and the school. Students will become acquainted with workplace writing simply by doing it. In most kinds of work, reading and writing of workplace documents is a routine, almost invisible form of literacy. These documents are seldom written and read as an end in themselves, as literature often is, but as a means to accomplish some other purpose. As teachers, our own workplace documents include such things as curriculum guides, lesson plans for substitutes, teaching contracts, behavior referrals, attendance reports, assignment instructions and guidelines, student handbooks, daily announcements, class rules, grade reports, and letters to parents. Documents like these are not our focus, but they support the more important work we do with students. In the same way that workplace documents support our work within schools and districts, they might be incorporated into the routines of our classrooms in ways that support teaching and learning. As a result, students will become acquainted with some of the fundamentals of workplace literacy as they use workplace documents to accomplish the work of English language arts.