Vol. 20 No. 7 Newsletter, Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching at Western Kentucky University

Writing Across the Curriculum in the 21st Century
By Jane Fife

Changes occurring in how we write

Writing in the 21 st century doesn't mean throwing out more traditional communication technologies like the pencil and word processor in favor of text messaging, email, and video. Instead, new technologies must be learned in addition to the traditional ones, and then decisions about technological format and delivery become part of the rhetorical choices that writers must make every time they face a communication task. Writing has become increasingly electronic and collaborative and this increasing complexity has come to require more creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills than ever before. For a good idea of how these skills can be defined in terms of writing, I recommend several National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) documents on the subject. NCTE asserts that

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to:

Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

(“NCTE Definition”)

Changes needed in how we teach

NCTE has also recommended a framework for the curriculum and the assessment of these twenty-first century literacies. This framework includes elements that weren't commonplace in discussions of assessing twentieth century writing, including: “students' selection of tools or media that most effectively communicate the intention of the product, “the “extent to which student products can emulate those of professionals,” the “extent to which students receive feedback from experts in the field,” and the “potential interaction with and impact on a global audience” (“21 st Century Curriculum and Assessment”). Finally, in a report released just two weeks ago from NCTE, Kathleen Yancey says, “Today, in the 21 st century, people write as never before--in print and online. We thus face three challenges that are also opportunities: developing new models of writing; designing a new curriculum supporting those models; and creating models for teaching that curriculum” (1). While the enormity of these challenges can sound quite daunting, we are getting considerable help from students' out-of-school literacy activities. As Kathy Yancey puts it: “Perhaps most important, seen historically this 21 st century writing marks the beginning of a new era in literacy, a period we might call the Age of Composition, a period where composers become composers not through direct and formal instruction alone (if at all), but rather though what we might call an extra-curricular social co- apprenticeship” (5).

Resources for curricular change

All the social networking, blogging, email, videography, and online reading/viewing/listening our students engage in immerses them in current texts and technologies. They are used to adapting to new technologies and can draw on this adaptability when we ask them to in the classroom. This technological ability can make our task of devising new models of writing less daunting; in part, the models are already being developed outside of academia and we are already using them (our students probably more so than we are). Additionally, the new curricula and pedagogies that support the new models of composing don't have to be designed from scratch. The writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) movement has already evolved into the electronic-communication- across-the-curriculum (ECAC) movement. The existing framework for WAC-- and its evolution into ECAC-- moves forward the process of developing 21 st century curricula and pedagogies, making the task seem less daunting.

Building on the WAC basics

As a writing teacher, I want to frame this issue of 21 st century thinking and communication skills in terms of pedagogy, specifically in terms of some of the most essential concepts of writing-across-the-curriculum scholarship: writing to learn and writing to communicate. Writing to learn usually involves informal genres of writing, like journals, and its goal is for the student to learn more deeply about concepts or how to apply them through this writing. Writing to communicate includes more formal genres, like the thesis-driven essay and reflects what a student has learned through the finished project. The former can be thought of as learning in process and the latter a more polished display of learning that has already occurred. Art Young, a longtime advocate of writing across the curriculum, explains the basics of WAC in his resource for teachers: Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum .

Electronic genres for collaborative learning: 21 st century classroom discourse

In this text, Young argues that ECAC has begun to carve out a middle ground between these established WAC categories: conversational learning through computer-mediated classroom discourse. While this type of learning certainly existed before in many forms of face-to-face conversation, technology allows this conversation to go on in writing, thus providing artifacts of learning for students and teachers to consult and learn from further. Examples of writing that fall into this category include group email exchanges, discussion boards, wikis, class blogs, chats, etc.

Technologizing genres of discovery writing for individuals: 21 st century “writing to learn”

Young's middle ground of conversational learning is not the only place where technology merges nicely with pedagogical goals. Traditional writing-to-learn assignments like freewrites, journals, diaries, letters to the teacher, and discovery drafts can be handled electronically through emails, blogs, non-interactive posts/ to discussion boards and wikis, making the exchange of texts and ideas easier to accomplish (and easing the strain on a teacher's back from carrying around bulky sets of response journals).

New Media Compositions as Learning Products: 21 st C “Writing to Communicate”

Obviously, writing-to-communicate assignments can also make use of new technological genres, breaking away from the print text to include PowerPoints, web pages, podcasts, videos and multimedia texts of many kinds. YouTube videos are becoming a popular end product for student learning, especially for video interpretations of literature. This type of assignment is not just pandering to the reading (or more often, viewing) preferences of our Millennial students. It involves the critical interpretation of a literary text into a new medium to emphasize certain aspects and themes as well as the rhetorical insight to determine what strategies of this medium will have the desired effect on the targeted audience. Additionally, students have to use the technology required to produce the video interpretation, and if it's a group project, will use electronic communication to coordinate their group efforts, enhancing their use of technology in order to get a project accomplished.

Programs available for free, such as Windows Moviemaker, can be learned quickly by students (and teachers). The publication platform available through YouTube, that they are all used to as consumers, helps students imagine the qualities of a finished video that people will enjoy watching and forward to others. And more traditional written expression need not be left out of the loop as newer electronic forms are added: Students can be asked to demonstrate what they learned from the assignment in a report reflecting on their goals for the multi-media text, the strategies they used to meet these goals, the collaborative process, and what they learned from the whole experience in terms of interpretation/analysis, technological composition, and teamwork.

In my Argument and Analysis class (English 301) last year, I asked my students to compose a video argument that used visuals effectively to meet their rhetorical goals. One student made very effective use of the strategy of juxtaposing contradictory words and images (a favorite rhetorical strategy of The DailyShow as described in this New York Times piece ). My student's video was called “Patriotic or Prohibited?” and explored the many ways that Americans break the code for displaying the American flag in their attempts to show patriotism. A purely written form of this argument (even an essay with some pictures included) would not have been as effective in conveying to his audience how common such infractions of the code are. Here's the link to the video which he decided to post on YouTube: “ Patriotic or Prohibited ?”

Here is an example of a video interpretation of a poem done with Windows Moviemaker (after one in-class tutorial and two in-class work sessions) by two students in my English 200 (Introduction to Literature) class last spring. The visual elements of the production are much more effective than the audio ones and nicely emphasize the humor of the poem. The students who made the movie decided to put it on YouTube although that was not a requirement of the assignment:“ Liberating a Pillar of Tortillas ”

Even if you don't feel ready to teach video composition in your classes or feel you can't schedule time into the semester for a major assignment in a multimodal form, you can still involve students in discussions and analysis of what makes a particular type of new media text (a category that is relevant to the goals and content of the course) effective. Discussion of video interpretation of poems and short stories (many are available on YouTube, most the result of class projects) helped my students realize more about the rhetorical effects of poems and how different interpretations emphasize different aspects of the original text.

To prepare students for the rhetorical decisions they will need to make among new options for texts in the future, assignments allowing some choice of format are key. If we ask students to choose textual formats and delivery modes based on the audience and what effect they want the text to have on that audience, it will challenge their rhetorical skills much more than if we establish all the parameters for the text's format (the typical “four typed, double-spaced pages in a 12-point font with one-inch margins, for example). Certainly we cannot predict the formats they may be using to compose in 20 years, but if we get them familiar with making complex and reflective choices about their communicative acts, they will be able to adapt to their brave new textual worlds more successfully.

References

Kakutani, Michiko. “Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?” The New York Times. 17 August 2008.< http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/08/17/arts/television/ 17kaku.html?_r=3&scp=1&sq=jon% 20stewart%20and%20trusted&st= cse >

NCTE. “NCTE Definition of 21 st Century Literacies.” NCTE website. 15 Feb. 2008. http://www.ncte.org/positions/ statements/21stcentdefinition

NCTE. “21 st Century Curriculum and Assessment Framework.” NCTE website. 19 Nov. 2008. < http://www.ncte.org/ positions/statements/ 21stcentframework >

Yancey, Kathleen. “Writing in the 21 st Century.” NCTE website. 17 Feb. 2009. http://www.ncte.org/library/ NCTEFiles/Press/Yancey_final. pdf

Young, Art. Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1999.