TEACHING OUR STUDENTS TO ADVOCATE AND MINISTER, IN JESUS' NAME, THROUGH THEIR WRITINGS
01/24/2017
For the past fourteen years, I have been using my gifts of writing and teaching to advocate for and minister to the broken, afflicted and broken-hearted people of the world. This has become Jesus' great calling of love and compassion for my life -- to advocate and minister through my writings. As composition teachers, we need to recognize that we have students, such as myself, who both have a love and adoration for Jesus and a passion for social justice issues and making the world a more just and caring and compassionate place. As such, we need to create composition courses that allow, encourage and support ministerial and advocacy writing on the part of students in our courses because this is the most valuable, in Jesus' eyes, writing that they can be doing and it is writing that makes a tremendous difference in the world and goes far beyond, in its impact on the world, than writing that is to be merely evaluated and graded. It is time for a REVIVAL in composition studies and time that we, as composition teachers, change our focus from being taskmasters and evaluators to being encouragers and supporters of writing that ministers to and advocates for the oppressed, broken, impoverished and broken-hearted of the world. We most definitely are capable of creating composition courses that allow students to use their God-given HEARTS and minds to advocate for social change and social justice in their worlds and to use their Jesus-given HEARTS to express love and compassion to the world and people around them. These are the most valuable and worthwhile things that our students and ourselves can be doing with their/our writing, which is a blessing and gift that we have all been given by God. We do not need to be evaluators and taskmasters because that is not who we are and who we are supposed to be, in Jesus' eyes, when we teach writing. We need, instead, to create writing assignments that engage students' HEARTS and minds in thinking about ways they can reach out to, re-envision and positively change and transform the worlds and people around them. These are the types of composition courses that I would like to create, and I would still love to start-up A CENTER FOR COMPOSITION AND WRITING STUDIES that teaches advocacy, ministerial, visionary and social justice writings, and I know that there are other composition studies teachers that can join me in starting-up this center and teaching these invaluable forms of writing to students -- that passionately engage students in writing projects that make an impact on and inspire change in the people and the worlds that they inhabit. If you are interested in teaching these forms of writings and have a passion for these forms of writing, please either email me at [email protected] or leave a comment in the comments section of this blog. MORE YET TO COME ON THIS BLOG ABOUT TEACHING THESE FORMS OF WRITING IN THE FUTURE. LOVE ALWAYS, DIANE K. OLSON