Everyone is a Writer!

Hi! 👋 I teach in the English department at MacEwan.

My approach to teaching has changed greatly since I first started in 1995. I think this is largely due to the influence of two experiences I had in the twenty years that followed: 1) teaching and learning from my children as I raised them, and 2) teaching and learning from customers of a web design and development consultancy I founded.

Children are naturally creative and do not wait to be given permission draw, write, and create things. Later, schooling often seems to take this permission away from them by treating them like empty vessels who require experts to learn. That's a disabling, dependency that kills creativity and self-motivation. Good schools and teachers ensure this doesn't happen; they inspire confidence.

It's a similar story when I am working on projects that aim to help people write, edit, and publish things online. People who hire a "designer," "developer," or "marketing consultant" to help them create and use a "content management system" or "ecommerce platform" for some business purpose generally do not consider themselves writers either. Sometimes they need to be coached and encouraged to see that they are writers, or that writing assistance is actually what they need. Often the technology itself will get in the way of its goals and generate anxieties that impede the not-so-simple task of writing and communicating well.

Today I see it as my task to convince my students (and everyone!) that (1) they are writers, (2) that writing is a never-quite-ending, both solitary and social process of clarifying thought, and 3) writing is a rewarding and fun thing to do!

Becoming a better reader and writer is essential to the task of learning to learn (learning to teach yourself) and learning to teach others. There's a lot of relatively new science to support this approach to student learning that I've found very helpful. I've been working through the material available from UBC's Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative and adapting some of it to my writing classes.

"People who are hooked on teaching are conditioned to be customers for everything else. They see their own personal growth as an accumulation of institutional outputs, and prefer what institutions make over what they themselves can do. They repress the ability to discover reality by their own lights."

—Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

"If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill your position, always hire the better writer. I don’t care if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, whatever. Assuming your candidates are fairly equally skilled and qualified overall, always hire the better writer. This is especially true with designers since copywriting is interface design..."