The New Writing Pedagogy By Angela Pascopella and Will Richardson November 2009

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Freshmen at the Academy for Civic and Entrepreneurial Leadership in Fresno, Calif., take tips from social media strategist Peter Lang and his staff, who are helping the students set up their own Facebook pages and school blogs.

“The shape of writing has changed,” agrees Troy Hicks, author of the recently released book The Digital Writing Workshop and assistant professor of English and director of the Chippewa River Writing Project at Central Michigan University. “Kids are now writing for real audiences and for real purposes, not just other kids in the class or the refrigerator door. And they are composing on computers and on phones in text and multimedia. These are substantial changes.”

Chris Sloan, an English teacher and media adviser at Judge Memorial Catholic High School, a college prep school in the Diocese of Salt Lake City, says students still need to be taught how to navigate online environments. Facebook and MySpace, for example, do a “good job” of connecting people socially, but they shouldn’t be the extent of students’ online presence, he says.

“That is a big fear for me—that we are inadequately preparing our youth for the future,” he says. “I think that the kind of research, learning and jobs of the very near future will increasingly require people to collaborate from a distance.”

Sloan, who teaches AP English literature, has his students do inquiry-based writing, which incorporates what they’re reading both online and in books. And he uses Youth Voices (www.youthvoices.net), an online space where teachers and students create multimodal compositions via formats such as text and video. “Students need to be able to find sources, critically examine them and communicate effectively to the larger group,” he says. “My goal is to inspire students to better themselves as writers, but more importantly, as people. I want my students to be active participants in our democracy, and knowing how to access and deal with the vast amounts of information available is a key skill.”

Sloan and Paul Allison, who teaches sophomore and junior English in the East West School of International Studies, which is part of the New Visions network of small schools in Flushing, N.Y., collaborate and build curriculum and wiki pages together on the Youth Voices site. And every Wednesday evening, through EdTechTalk (www.edtechtalk.com), teachers across the nation and in the East West School stay in touch via webcasting. They may hold a virtual staff meeting in which they interview software developers for upcoming programs they might want and hash out issues of online learning, says Allison, who is also the technology coordinator for the New York City Writing Project. The project’s goal is to improve the teaching and learning of language and literacy in New York City public schools by increasing teachers’ abilities to use writing as a tool for learning, thinking and communicating.

Allison started using social networking in his classes about six years ago when he met two other educators in a summer workshop. They set up a blog site to get the three classes of students communicating with one another. They now use Drupal, which gives educators choices. The whole world can see and comment on writings from students, but educators can close or open any individual post they want. Allison can also determine if he only wants other teachers or administrators to see the site.

“My students are writing things that they are passionate about and willing to stick with and do research on and talk to other students about,” he says. For example, one of his students wrote a blog post about abolishing school uniforms. “I don’t think he would have written it if he wrote for the school newspaper,” Allison explains. “So it’s like quasi-school. But it’s what he wants to write about. And he’ll get responses from kids in Boston and Utah.”

The students can write about books they are reading and even make MP3 files—for example, recording four minutes of a synopsis of a book—that they post on their blog. They also post Twitter-like updates a few times a week.

Grammar and spelling are not emphasized, because the focus is on communicating with peers in fast microposts, but Allison says he works with students to self-assess and then eventually grades the bigger discussion pieces that include quotes from many different online resources and multimedia.

In the Crossing to College group, senior students can communicate with college students, who can explain the difference between writing in high school and writing in college. “It’s about a real audience,” Allison says.

Childers of the Academy for Civic and Entrepreneurial Leadership in California has a new plan to include writing in the school’s curriculum, with as much of it as possible online using tools such as Google Docs, student blogs and possibly Twitter. “I think that if we are going to live in a digital age, we have to reassess everything that we are teaching in schools to see if there is a digital component or vehicle that is available to utilize,” says Childers.

In these online spaces, students and educators write not just to communicate but to connect. Whereas publishing was once the end point in the writing process, it is now a midpoint, the place where the interaction with readers and subsequent conversations begin through comments on or revisions and linking. Sharing one’s writing with a potential global audience is a means to creating networks of learners who share an interest or passion. Their interactions can continue for a lifetime. But while this sharing creates all sorts of opportunities for students, it also creates a new level of complexity that requires they become adept at navigating a more transparent life online and at managing a much more distributed conversation that is carried on asynchronously in many different places. Figuring out how to help students manage those shifts is, in large measure, where schools are struggling right now.

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