Teaching Writing in a Project-Based Environment

Designing curriculum around project-based assessment while figuring out how to teach literacy skills (or any academic skills) is challenging. As I reflect on the units and projects that I developed and taught this year, I realize that in many cases the writing was something that was attached to projects, instead of the writing being an authentic and essential part of the project itself. For example, the students would be asked to create a piece of art or an artifact in response to some text, and then they would need to write about what they have created. What I would like to do moving forward is to design projects where the writing involved is an essential part of the generation of the product. In this way, I wouldn't always be teaching the formal academic writing skills from introduction, evidence paragraphs, and conclusion, but I would still be teaching the crucial understanding of writing as a purposeful endeavor within a particular context. I still recognize how important it is for students to learn and build their skills with formal academic writing assignments, and when I assign them, I would like to focus my instruction on that writing as a project. I believe these writing assignments, when taught appropriately, can be considered projects. You can see evidence of this through the depth of good writing instruction in many sources, and I would recommend Teaching for Joy and Justice by Linda Christensen. By focusing the teaching and learning of my classroom towards specific projects, instead of different assignments layered on top of each other, I believe we all learn more.