I don’t remember having a lot of experience with sociocultural writing in school. We would be asked to write about our experiences sometimes. I went to a pretty diverse K-8 school. We would have prompts about some diverse topics, I believe, or be able to share writing that was about our lives. I remember in 2nd or 3rd grade we would write about why we appreciated our moms or what we like to do at home. Informal writing then focused on us writing ideas and drawing pictures to go with them. I don’t believe we were ever corrected massively on grammar or syntax then. The teacher seemed to simply want us to write.

As writing became more complex grammar was king. I remember the red pen that reminded me of blood on my page heralding all the correcting I needed to do, that made me feel small. I switched to a more homogenously white high school. I remember having to write a research paper that made us look at culture and context of a specific part of World War II. In college we often had to think with a culturally diverse lense when writing lesson plans.

I do not ever remember being explicitly taught this concept of sociocultural writing; however, I would like to utilize sociocultural writing in my classroom. My students are working in a framework of half languages often. They are not fully competent in English and have not had consistent models of ASL to correctly master either language. I as a teacher need to work harder to model and explicitly teach both languages as valid and celebrate their differences. I would also like to bring in more diverse voices for example, read poetry that involves other vernaculars from differing voices. I can use African American Vernacular English (AAVE), ASL, and standard English to show the similarities, differenes, and immense varieties of language. I also liked the differing ideas from the article about how to use "new literacies." My students are oftn excited about social media. perhaps doing a lesson on social media writing and discussing informal/formal writing would be beneficial.