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Contact:
Claudia Monlouis
Monday, November 8, 2004 - Primary and Secondary School teachers
undergoing training at the Division of Teacher Education at the Sir Arthur Lewis
Community College (SALCC), are the major players in two innovative projects
dubbed “The Writers Garden and the Writers Workshop”.
The projects form part of a special course - The Teaching of Writing - which
introduces the student-teachers to a refreshing set of classroom techniques.
The teachers are expected to inject a new element of creativity into the subject
area of Language and Writing upon their return to the classroom.
Language Arts Lecturer at the Division of Teacher Education and Educational
Administration, Ms. Lisa Sargusingh-Terrance said that the College was also
promoting this new approach, which challenges teachers to realize that their
individual creativity must be brought to bear, in order to effectively transmit
knowledge.
“This course actually focuses on teaching our student teachers how to approach
writing in their classrooms from a process approach and moving away from what we
call the traditional approach to writing, whereby the focus was just on the
final product”, said Ms. Sargusingh-Terrance, adding, “we have gone through the
stages of the writing process from pre-writing to publishing, which is actually
what authors do when they write, and coming out of this course our students
produced a number of pieces.”
Ms. Sargusingh-Terrance said the teachers have opted to display their
creativity, using unique initiatives dubbed “The Writers Garden” and the
“Writers Workshop”: “The pieces that they are putting into the Writers Garden
are not the typical kind of writing pieces that one would do in the classroom
even at the Secondary level, because they wrote pieces such as obituaries and
recipes, and it’s not obituaries for people, obituaries for things like a
pencil, an obituary for a dead computer”.
The overall aim of the project is to ensure that the local education system
produces persons who can become ‘the skilled writers and authors of the future’.
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