Nancie Atwell calls theme “the chilliest mind Popsicle” of all the writing lessons that young writers need to learn, and I couldn’t agree more. (Atwell, 2015, 101)
Theme is one of the toughest lessons I have had to learn to teach in both reading and writing and by the time I did, I not only got to experience the helplessness a teacher feels when they see her students trying their hardest and still failing but also the unpleasantness and self-doubt she is forced to face when students appear to lose trust in her teaching ability.
Atwell’s Rule of So What? moved the needle significantly, especially because exploring theme as writers made it more accessible and less abstruse as readers.
Even after my students could understand and identify themes in the texts they read*, their struggle with theme continue to haunt their memoirs and poems in two major ways:
- The topics they choose simply do not lend themselves to meaning-making or a theme at the moment. The school picnic, the surprise birthday party, their first day at the new school – topics they feel strongly about that turn into just a report of what happened on the day. My students are either not developmentally ready to understand why those memories mean so much to them, or sometimes, they have chosen clichéd topics because they don’t know any better.
- Some of the meanings they made out of their experiences feel forced. My students feel compelled to convert every obstacle in their life into a stepping stone, to see the best in everyone and everything, to even thank an abusive person for making them ‘stronger’. Conditioning and culture play as much a role as their reading experience in contributing to toxic positivity in their conclusions. This is not a surprising outcome in contexts where both adults and stories for children are committed to constantly teaching children how things should be as opposed to observing, describing and understanding the world and helping children make sense of it.
When I confronted this struggle as a beginning teacher, I found myself resorting to the same solution repeatedly: convince the student to choose a different topic. Over time, I have come to understand that topic choice is often not the problem. Even though the topics they choose might appear clichéd and insignificant to me, it is rarely meaningless to my students, even if they may not be able to articulate the meaning right now. The more I learn about trauma and how our emotional selves work, the more I find myself making meaning of my own past, years and decades later, the clearer it is to me that expecting children and young adults to always be ready to articulate emotional intricacies is not just unfair but can even lead to unintentionally dismissing an event or memory that is pivotal in their life’s story.
My next challenge was to apply this understanding in my lessons on topic choice and theme. I did it by introducing the concept of ‘processing an experience.’ Here are my lesson slides:
This lesson has shifted the writing and writers in my classroom in at least five major ways:
- I find myself asking students to change the topic less and less.
- I don’t have students who still say, “I don’t know what to write about,” well into weeks 2 and 3 of the unit.
- Students now abandon or postpone writing about topics without tainting the event/memory/experience they wanted to write about.
- Instead of “I can’t find a So What?”, I have begun to hear more of, “I don’t know what this means to me, but I know it’s very important.”
- Sometimes, when complete processing isn’t possible in the time frame available, students are able to articulate their partial, current-moment processing instead of writing forced, positive takeaways such as, “I learned to always believe in myself,” which, by the way, was what Anisha wrote in her first draft.
If you’d like to use my slides, here they are in PDF and PPTX formats:
Important Note: When students choose to write about difficult experiences such as abuse, immediately deprioritize the writing and make the student’s well-being the top priority. This might mean different things in different settings, such as working with the school psychologist, getting the parents involved, etc. It might also mean nudging the child to choose a different topic for unit-end submissions, etc., even if the new topic isn’t “as memoir-worthy”. Please read Alex Shevrin Venet’s work for more clarity.
*The one theme lesson in reading that has always hit the nail on the head for me is the signpost lesson, Words of the Wiser, from Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst.
References
Atwell, N. (2015). In the Middle: A Lifetime of Learning about Writing, Reading, and Adolescents (3rd ed.). Heinemann.
Do your students struggle with theme in their writing, too? What are your thoughts on teaching processing? Comment below or get in touch with me on Twitter @teachingtenets.
For more of my writing, visit my Substack: https://teachingtenets.substack.com/
-Aishwarya
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