When reading the paper “Reading and Writing without Authority” by Ann M. Penrose and Cheryl Gei, The authors took two people from very different backgrounds and with varying experience in a specific field and tasked them to write an essay. its interesting to me that Janet was so dedicated to the truth when writing her informational essay, rather than Roger who had much more experience and knowledge than her. Although because of this quest for the absolute truth (even in areas where she wouldn’t not have been able to find it) it inevitably ender in her making her path to completing and writing her essay significantly more difficult, but it also resulted in her learning more from what she was writing. However that is not a path that most students would take, towards the end of the paper when they mention teaching towards authority, and that entails giving students more involvement in what they do in the classroom and in turn this gives them a sense of authority in what they do, resulting in better outcomes when it comes to writing in this case. However this makes me wonder, if students need to be involved more in the classroom settings from what they work on to having group discussion to instill authority, can that result in some students still falling through the cracks and not feeling “involved” ? and if this is the case, is there a way to prevent this? I believe the best way to stop students from slipping through the cracks would be to personalize some aspects of a classroom to each student, making them the authority figure in everything or most things they do.
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