by Jihee Kang, Art Education
When the summer temperature in Athens is scorching hot, reaching its peak to prevent people from going outside in the middle of the day, the fall semester starts. As one usually does, you accessed eLC (the online learning system of UGA), which might not have been done during the summer break and started to read course syllabuses word by word. Expectedly, most of the course assignments contain discussion posts, essays, presentations, literature reviews, and research papers. A lot of writing! One might whisper, “Okay, it is again full of writing! It is time to get accustomed to it.”
As a person who came from a country that barely assigns writing in the university environment, the question that I have had was “Why do I have to write, and ask students to write that much?” For an international graduate student who started studying abroad only a year ago, writing assignments have been a burden in not only language but writing itself. I could see clear differences, probably from the culture of academia, that the amount of writing assigned in the class was much greater than in my former undergraduate and graduate studies in South Korea, which is more prone to assess students based on memorizing the knowledge. Even though I am still not well accustomed to this change, I could find a lot of benefits of writing to develop one’s understanding.
Why do we write? Gottschalk and Hjortshoj (2004) answer this question with great insight about writing assignments as an opportunity for active learning. They say, “Student writing can chart otherwise unknown territory and provide points of reckoning on the map you need for steering a course, now and in following terms” (p. 24). I totally agree with this statement, as I realized myself utilizing writing as an instrument of understanding. Based on this notion, I found four benefits of using writing to develop understanding:
First, to write, one should recall what one has read or learned so far. Bringing knowledge from long-term memory helps retrieve the knowledge you had and what you learned from the course.
Second, one should deeply engage with the content in order to describe what they want to say. The problem that I noticed in the learning of my students and of myself was that there is a gap between what we actually practice and what we learn from education. Writing itself is an active practice that encourages writers to connect with different contexts.
Third, one should reorganize knowledge to say what one wants to say. I would like to call it storytelling; the speaker/author necessarily rearranges what they want to deliver considering the audience and the aim. This requires substantial cognitive processes to digest the knowledge and further reproduce it.
Finally, to write about a specific field, one should understand the language and knowledge of the discipline. Similar to storytelling, studying a disciplinary topic means that you are accustomed to the language of the discipline. This inversely helps you to internalize the disciplinary knowledge and foster deep understanding.