Katt Blackwell-Starnes's List: On Teaching Composition

• Purposes for writing include developing social networks; engaging in civic discourse; supporting personal and spiritual growth; reflecting on experience; communicating professionally and academically; building relationships with others, including friends, family, and like-minded individuals; and engaging in aesthetic experiences.
• Writing with certain purposes in mind, the writer focuses her attention on what the audience is thinking or believing; other times, the writer focuses more on the information she is organizing, or on her own thoughts and feelings. Therefore, the thinking, the procedures, and the physical format in writing all differ when writers’ purposes vary.

• teachers need to understand:

  • The wide range of purposes for which people write, and the forms of writing that arise from those purposes.
• People who read a lot have a much easier time getting better at writing. In order to write a particular kind of text, it helps if the writer has read that kind of text. In order to take on a particular style of language, the writer needs to have read that language, to have heard it in her mind, so that she can hear it again in order to compose it.
• Additionally, reading is a vital source of information and ideas. For writers fully to contribute to a given topic or to be effective in a given situation, they must be familiar with what previous writers have said. Reading also creates a sense of what one's audience knows or expects on a topic.
• Students should also have access to and experience in reading material that presents both published and student writing in various genres. Through immersion in a genre, students develop an internalized sense of why an author would select a particular genre for a particular purpose, the power of a particular genre to convey a message, and the rhetorical constraints and possibilities inherent in a genre.
• How writers read in a special way, with an eye toward not just what the text says but how it is put together.

  • Diigo!
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• The ways writers form and use constructs of their intended readers, anticipating their responses and needs.

  • Social Bookmarking aids this by allowing more research in a synthesized location than previously seen.
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• Writers need to be able to think about the physical design of text, about the appropriateness and thematic content of visual images, about the integration of sound with a reading experience, and about the medium that is most appropriate for a particular message, purpose, and audience.

• What does this mean for teaching?

  Writing instruction must accommodate the explosion in technology from the world around us.

• Teachers need to understand at least the following in order to be excellent at teaching composition as involving multiple media:

  • A range of new genres that have emerged with the increase in electronic communication.
• How to navigate both the World Wide Web and web-based databases.

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• One definition of being a literate consumer might be that in addition to "being able to download information to your brain," says Fisch, you also are able to "remix it and repurpose it and share it back out to the world."
• For Dawn Hogue, 21st century literacies are "all about a community and sharing and collaboration

  • Social bookmarking
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• says Richardson. "We don't need to be so pigeon-holed into a curriculum that treats everyone the same way, that really doesn't provide a lot of personalization or license to pursue those things that are of interest to you.
• "Literacy is defined by communications technologies and by your culture and your community," says Morrell,
• "We always have to ask: how do people communicate in our time? However that question is answered is how literacy is defined."
• What Web 2.0 allows people to do—"the real big change here"—is to self-publish, says Richardson. Users can create and then post what's been created to a much larger audience, and then create networks around the things that are published.
• While Hogue's students write frequently in class, they often don't see it as writing, because it's not the typical paper printed out and handed in to the teacher. Yet, they are more personally invested in the writing they do for her, because of the wider audience.
• Bud Hunt notes that, as English teachers, "we're not just teaching them the traditional essay anymore, we're teaching them to compose in many different media now, in video, audio, and text, and we can put these together in powerful ways."
• "I had a teacher come up after a presentation I did last year and get very agitated about it; he wanted to use all the cool, free sites online for his students, but the district was so afraid of liability that he couldn't get to what he wanted. The approval system was too cumbersome to be useful. I've heard of teachers having to wait MONTHS to get a single site unblocked."

  • e-pedagogies. This needs to be addressed and a few work-arounds provided.

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• Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies.
• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• • Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

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• It can refer to participatingin chat rooms or creating webpages
• work in one medium is used to enhance learning in the other.

  • Research in social bookmarking forums can enhance writing by providing students with 1) easier access to research which 2)allows them the opportunity to conduct more research in less time and gain a better idea of the discussions on the topic. This means 3) they are not spending all of their time trying to find THE article and can spend more time writing with a more informed view of the topic.
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• Assumptions

  Courses that engage students in writing digitally may have many features, but all of them should

  1. introduce students to the epistemic (knowledge-constructing) characteristics of information technology, some of which are generic to information technology and some of which are specific to the fields in which the information technology is used;
  2. provide students with opportunities to apply digital technologies to solve substantial problems common to the academic, professional, civic, and/or personal realm of their lives;
  3. include much hands-on use of technologies;
  4. engage students in the critical evaluation of information (see American Library Association, “Information Literacy”); and
  5. prepare students to be reflective practitioners.

  • Social bookmarking meets all of these features when used properly.
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• To restrict students’ engagement with writing to only academic contexts and forms is to risk narrowing what we as a nation can remember, understand, and create.
• many genres and uses of writing must be taught well
• forms of cross-cultural discourse that bridge the divides among speakers of various Englishes as well as speakers of other languages, especially collaborative, visual, and internet-based projects, including websites, wikis, blogs, newsletters, interviews, and profiles.

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