Scholarship is a goal of learning

emember how proud you were of yourself when you found your family and friends in the audience at your high school graduation? Remember how you felt with your friends? Remember the feeling you had celebrating your scholarship with family and friends? You were dressed like a scholar and you were proclaiming that on this day. Graduation ends the school year celebrating scholarship. One of the functions of the school is to promote scholarship and to create scholars.

	Ted, the proud parent, and his daughter, Caitlin, at her middle school graduation, June 1999.

School graduation is the highlight of every school year. It is an event at every school across the country. Students are honored for their scholastic achievement. Some proud parents stand up and cheer or shout, some take pictures, some run up and down the aisles proclaiming that child as hir own. Students walk proudly with their prize in their graduation gown. Graduation celebrates scholarship. Scholarship verifies learning.

Acquiring knowledge, savoring the joy of knowing, wanting to be a scholar is a goal of learning. Scholarship leads to POWER. Scholarship is attainable by all. All students are scholars. There is genius in all of us, Armstrong tells us. As scholarship becomes the focus of learning.

Pradl speaks of "textual ownership," which provides a link to the theory of "anchoring authority" with the writer. One way scholars begin to take ownership and ultimately authority is when they DO it, make, construct the work, preferably on the web for public viewing. One of the marks of scholarship is making the work public, followed by peer review which then involves the learner in self assessment and more AUTHENTIC learning.

The most common form of scholarship as it is practiced today is in the doctoral process. Doctoral candidates engage in extensive research, practice peer review, defend their opinions in front of a panel of experts, and finally publish their work. Why not do this in fifth grade, too? Or even PERSONAL webfolios?

Lori's students answering a cry for help.

To help students morph into scholars, we need to begin practicing scholarship earlier. This practice begins by having the young scholars publish their work on the Internet so the COMMUNITY: peers, parents, other teachers, employers, college students, citizens, and netizens can help in the learning process.

Teacher scholarship is fostered by the Carnegie Foundation, which supports Teacher Scholarship. Teacher scholarship provides teachers with the opportunity of exploring their own pedagogy to better practice in the classroom. Teacher scholarship also serves as a model to show students how to become scholars themselves.

Scholars all have one thing in common: scholars make their work public. By making their work public, they are exposing their ideas and letting the public know what they think and believe. Once their work is public a DIVERSE audience has access to this work. This begins a second important facet of scholarship, peer review. Scholars exchange ideas and knowledge by reading each other's work and commenting on it. This strengthens both of the scholar's work. The third thing scholars do is to pass their work on to others by publishing.

Lori notes...I shared an article that I wrote for English Journal with my students. I explained that I made my work public, it was reviewed by my peers, and now could be cited by other people writing on the topic. My students, in turn, are writing about the texts they are reading, reading what other students are writing about these texts, and then citing what they admire from one another's writing.

	When students make their work public and engage in peer review, scholarship happens.

Setting up my homepage with Geocities a few weeks before I began my Cyber English class, allowed me to experience what my students would go through. I made the same mistakes (e.g.- coding errors) that they would make; this made it easier for me to quickly respond to constant cries of "why isn't this working?!"

By practicing what we preach, teachers can act as models for our students. Teachers of writing have been talking for years about the fact that we need to write alongside our students. By doing what we ask of them, we can anticipate particular problems, propose possible solutions, and have a better understanding of the writing process. The same holds true of teaching in the Cyber English classroom.