The Danger of a Single Story: Why ELA Classrooms Matter

I have wanted to write this post for awhile, as I've loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie since the moment I learned about her and her work.  Adichie is an incredible author who was born and raised in Nigeria and has written several novels and short stories that have been published in over 30 languages.  She is an articulate and talented individual; she uses her identity and skillsets to create beautiful work, but also to actively promote values and ideals she holds important.  I could spend an overwhelming number of words describing her books, talks, and life accomplishments and I'd actually be happy to do that, but, I wanted to dedicate this particular blog post to a TED talk that Adichie gave in July of 2009. [embed]http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en[/embed]

In her talk, Adichie reflects on the danger of only knowing one story, one narrative, or one perspective.  She shares how growing up with a "single story" depicted in the literature she read hindered her own ability to express her culture and life as a child in Nigeria.  As an adult, the "single story" myth caused her to accidentally develop one-dimensional and inaccurate images of peoples foreign to her.  Coming out of those experiences, Adichie poses the questions: How can we really know anyone through a single story?  How can a single story ever capture the complexity of a culture, a people, or a nation?

Adichie goes on to push this one step further by analyzing how the myth of the single story not only puts the hearer or reader in the position of having an incomplete or simplistic impression of people or places; it also heavily represses and misrepresents the individuals depicted.

'Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.' - Adichie

This TED talk captures, in essence, what I believe to be the most important role of the ELA classroom: to teach students to demand multiple stories, to question suspiciously unified narratives, and to embrace the duality and complexity that comes with gathering information about the unfamiliar.  Developing students who insist on more stories and refuse to accept any single story as representative of a people or a place not only respects and honors our increasingly diverse classrooms and societies; it also creates the kinds of citizens our increasingly complex world needs.  I want my classroom to produce individuals who have meaningfully read white, Western literature, but who have also wrestled with female, multicultural authors and who have considered the multitude of perceptions that exist in any given topic.  These are the students who will be able to operate meaningfully, intelligently, and justly throughout our globalized society.  These are the students who will hear, respect, and respond to voices speaking for and from all classes, races, and genders.  These are the students that I make it my goal to cultivate.

"I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise." -Adichie

Multimodality: What is it Good for?

In my previous post on the importance of multimodality in 21st century literacies, I defined my understanding of what multimodality is and explored the idea that our culture's commonly dismissive and condescending view of multimodality in the English classroom is, at the very least, up for debate.  In this blog post, I'm going to raise some of what I consider to be fairly compelling arguments for the use of multimodal assignments in the modern high school classroom.  These arguments are somewhat varied in scope and are listed in no particular order of importance or otherwise! 1) Modes of communication are inextricably linked to one another; a composition is never composed entirely in a single mode without some reliance on additional modes. Reading musical compositions, while largely an audio endeavor, has a necessary visual component in that music is recorded and printed with a complex set of symbols.  Music is also a gestural, physical meaning-making process; any music lover will tell you that you never get the full meaning of a song until you watch the artist physically perform that piece, factoring in body language, facial expressions, and musical technique.  These modes all interact with one another to create the integrated meaning of a musical composition.  Even our beloved default of the alphabetical mode is actually a very visual mode in that it is a complex series of symbols that students learn to recognize.  Print alphabetical texts are rarely devoid of visual, nonalphabetical cues; authors can communicate necessary information to readers through font, spacing, layout, and a wide array of other visual tools. Understanding how different modes interact with one another and with the audience creates students who can critically and meaningfully analyze pieces composed in any combination of modes, enabling them to interpret complex cues and messages.

2) Teaching students to apply the rigorous approaches of literary analysis to multimodal compositions enables them to meaningfully and insightfully approach a wide variety of interdisciplinary compositions.  Art, music, drama, mathematics, and a host of other disciplines rely heavily on modes other than the alphabetical in their compositions.  When we teach students to read, analyze, respond intelligently to, and produce multimodal compositions, we equip them with valuable tools to apply their literary skills across the disciplines.

3) Multimodal projects often work well as digital assignments.  Multimodal assignments do not necessarily require digital tools; however, they do present the occasion for students to test and develop their technological skills while strengthening complex rhetorical and analytical skills.  See my prior blog post for more reflection on how necessary it is for our modern students to be fluent and creative in digital spheres.

4) Offering students an opportunity to compose multimodally is a fun and alternative way to engage ELL students who might otherwise have difficulty connecting with and completing a composition assignment in the traditional, alphabetic mode.  Students who struggle with English as a nonnative language may thrive when given an assignment in which they can compose freely without the added concern for grammar, academic language, or spelling.  This gives ELL students a chance to build confidence and fluency while also developing and utilizing complex composition and critical analysis skills.

5) Integrating academically rigorous work that appeals to a student body demonstrating a variety of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences can be challenging.  Multimodal work, digital or non-digital, can respect, engage, and develop students of all learning styles.  Assignments that ask students to make intelligent and strategic choices in modes that come naturally to them in order to intelligently create meaning are tasks that both challenge and encourage academic identities.  The ability to use sound, motion, color, or image in order to convey what may be a very insightful or intelligent idea can often be a huge relief for a student who struggles to convey those ideas in the traditional alphabetic mode and whose primary intelligence is not verbal/linguistic.

6) The real world is multimodal.  The social, career, and recreational spheres of modern life are all multimodal, featuring complex combinations of sounds, images, and text.  If we don't teach our students to be smart consumers of the information and entertainment that they are bombarded with, they will struggle to navigate the fast-paced culture in which they live.  Assigning challenging and rigorous analyses of composer choices in multimodal pieces as well as asking students to make those choices in their own compositions helps our students grow into smart, savvy individuals capable of functioning expertly in their society and culture.

These are just a few points in a litany of what I consider to be very valid arguments as to why multimodal composition is important, if not essential, in the modern English classroom. In all of these points, I make repeated mention of rigorous and challenging academic analyses of multimodal compositions.  Given that multimodality is somewhat unfamiliar in an academic context, it can sometimes be difficult to envision how a multimodal assignment can be intellectually and analytically demanding for a student in the same way an essay or paper can.  How can a video assignment help students develop tangible skills that may translate into their paper writing?  How can a student's compositional skills in the alphabetic mode really be tested and stretched in a non-alphabetic mode? To help shed some light on this, in my next blog post, I will be posting a video composition of my own that I completed as part of a graduate class.  Along with that video composition, I'll include some discussion of the fairly complicated compositional choices I had to make in compiling it as well as some of the academic research I relied on in making those decisions.  My hope is that this will offer a little bit of insight into the complexity and potential for pedagogical use that well-designed multimodal assignments can have for a 21st century classroom.

I also recognize the great irony of relying so heavily on the traditional, alphabetic mode to write about the need for multimodality and the unprecedented communicative power of multimodal compositions. But, in my defense, would you take my points seriously if I communicated them in an alternative mode?

Using the Digital Writer/Reader Relationship to Teach Writing as a Social Act

Resuming my stint of blog posts relating to 21st century literacies, I wanted to include some research that I recently presented at UMass Boston English Department's Conference on Teaching Composition, Engaging Practices, while on a panel with my brilliant and talented colleagues from Salem State. My conference paper discussed how the writer/reader relationship in digital writing is a powerful tool for teaching high school students about writing as a social, dialogical meaning-making act.  In the academic world of contrived assignments and prompts that are intended to be read by the audience of the teacher doing the assigning, sometimes it can be difficult to help students tangibly understand how their goal as writers needs to be communication and participation in a larger conversation.  Students with an understanding of writing as a removed, individualistic endeavor have to learn to value collaboration and interaction in their writing.  In this regard, digital writing can be used as a tool in the modern classroom to give students immediate, hands-on experience with the social and dialogic nature of writing.  The idea that writing can and should be responsive within a larger and ongoing conversation is rarely more evident than in digital writing genres, where immediate and prolific distribution, quick response times, and interactive composition designs all contribute to a uniquely blurred distinction between writer and reader.  Digital writing creates an environment in which the boundaries between the author and the reader of any text are deeply confounded and subverted in ways that offer students the unprecedented opportunity to explore the interactive and responsive nature of writing.

Writing as a Social Act

Courtesy of Creative Commons.

The understanding of writing as a social act traces its roots back to Mikhail Bahktin’s understanding of expression through means of discourse with the world around us.  In Bakhtin’s view of verbal expression, meaning is formed by the speaker relative to the expressions of other individuals in the speaker’s environment.  “I live in a world of others’ words” (Bakhtin, Problems 143).  In Bakhtin’s theory, it is impossible to remove words from the ongoing legacy of conversation and cultural expression.  With this understanding, all of speech, and, by extension, writing becomes “inherently responsive” and functions, as Bahktin phrases it, as “a link in the chain of communication” (Bakhtin, Genres 68, 84).

One of the implications of understanding writing as participation in an ongoing, responsive dialogue is that the rigid distinctions separating author and reader are blurred.  When writing is viewed as a dialogical act, the writer and the author are somewhat conflated, each informing the work of the other through the mutual act of conversation.  Kenneth Bruffee phrases it by saying that “reader and writer become part of each others’ sustaining environment” (153).

The Confounded Author/Reader Relationship

Helping students develop an awareness of those more complicated reader and writer roles as well as the conversational view of writing that informs those roles is an important part of developing their personal composition processes.  Ann Berthoff's theories stress that effective composition pedagogy makes students aware of how language and construction of meaning occur in their own thought processes.  Berthoff holds that students do not necessarily need to learn how to form meaning because that is a natural occurrence.  The important component of skilled composition instruction is to teach students to be aware of how they form meanings and what impacts that formation.  The goal that arises from Berthoff and Bakhtin’s theories is to help students understand how words and expression are formed socially and conversationally in order to help them understand and inhabit their own roles as writers and readers in meaningful ways.

Why does it matter?

Teaching students to understand both the writer and reader roles, as well as how those roles can be blurred and conflated, is a necessary component in teaching students to effectively make meaning through their writing.  It allows students to recognize and enter into a community of conversing individuals, engage with diverse perspectives and ideas, and then allow those diverse perspectives and ideas to inform their own as they work to write in ways that then contribute their developing ideas to the wider conversation.  Students become aware of themselves and their thought processes in relation to the other writers in a dialogue.  Their understanding of their roles as writers is informed by their understanding of their somewhat simultaneous roles as readers of the active and ongoing dialogue in which they are participating, facilitating effective and insightful communication through writing.

The Role of Digital Writing

Courtesy of Creative Commons.

The effort to teach students to understand and engage in the complex reader/writer role is where digital writing becomes extremely useful. Digital writing genres, like the ones discussed in my prior blog post, in which the interactive and collaborative nature of writing is very evident, provide instances for students to write and to interact with one another’s compositions in ways that resist that idea of a removed, individual author.  This kind of reader/author interaction is not possible to the same degree in traditional print texts.  Elizabeth Losh discusses how, when interacting with a more traditional print text, there is no real opportunity for immediate response to or interaction with the author or fellow readers of that text; however, the same is not true of digital text.

The reader’s interactions with existing digital texts cover a fairly wide scope.  An example of a naturally dialogic and collaborative digital text is a blog post like this one!  Blog posts are often valued at least in part for the number and complexity of discussion comments on the post.  Reader conversation and interaction with one another and with the author of the blog post itself creates the blog page composition as a whole. Generally, comments at the bottom of the blog post are viewed as part of the blog post itself.  Other examples of naturally responsive, social digital writing documents are Facebook posts in which readers are invited to comment on the author’s posting, online forums in which a question is posted and the resulting conversation in response to that question makes up the substance of that forum post page as a whole, or email threads, where the thread is made up of compositions by the readers of the initial email.  These genres of digital writing are inherently comprised of authorship originating from readers of some version of the document itself, creating a very immediate and tangible sense of the ways in which composition is social, active, and responsive.

Another unique way in which digital writing blurs the distinction between author and reader centers around the chronology with which a reader experiences a text.  In traditional print texts, the author creates a fairly linear, one-directional experience that the reader is expected to undergo exactly as the author has laid out.  Chapters and pages are numbered and the expectation is that the reader will read them in that order, starting at the top, left-hand corner of the page and working their way across and down. Gunther Kress observes that this form of composition limits the “reader’s freedom to act” (3).  In digital compositions, this is often not the case.  Websites feature large bodies of text and information arranged in nonlinear formats.  There is not a predetermined or even a suggested reading path for these sites.  Readers of this kind of digital text are authors of their own experiences.  They choose the point at which they enter a page and the approach they take to reading the site as a whole. The same is true of blog posts that include hyperlinks in the text.  These hyperlinks are scattered throughout the text, giving the reader the choice of whether or not to click those links or what order to click them in. Gunther Kress summarizes the impact this kind of composition has on the role of the reader by saying “In this new … world, it is the readers who fashion their own knowledge, from information supplied by makers of the site” (6).

Getting Students Involved

Courtesy of Creative Commons.

Going beyond using the nature of digital writing to merely expose students to the conversations that composition creates and engages in, digital writing can also be incorporated into the classroom in order to offer students the opportunity to actually experience and participate in those conversations.  Part of the appeal of using digital writing in the classroom is the access students gain to the ongoing conversations we are trying to teach them about; they can see the activity of the conversation and then join in with their own compositions and thoughts.  The Internet’s capacity for speed and reach creates an incredible potential for student interaction with a nearly infinite range of possibilities.  Utilizing classroom blogs, posting to academic forums, or commenting on news articles are all examples of ways in which students can gain valuable experience in reading a text, composing a response, and then joining in the wider conversation.  This sort of experience can tangibly and practically teach students that, as readers, they also bring authorial influence to their reading; in authoring a composition, they must be aware of the conversation their composition contributes to and how other members of that dialogue can and potentially will respond.  Participation in these types of digital writing conversations can help cultivate a working understanding of composition as dialogical and social, which creates more thoughtful, skilled, and engaged writers who are capable of utilizing the 21st century digital literacies discussed in my blog post introducing this series.

How This Empowers Diverse Student Writers

Incorporating this social, dialogical understanding of composition pedagogy into the classroom using digital writing also has the potential to empower students of diverse ability levels and backgrounds.  It is a pedagogy that is, as Elizabeth Losh phrases it, “critical of dominant ideologies about language that reinforce existing and often unjust power structures, which exclude certain social actors from participating in communicative exchanges” (58).  Digital writing uniquely complicates the separation between author and reader in a way that challenges social and cultural standards that dictate who has the influence to author texts and who does not.   When the authority of the author role becomes accessible to everyone equally, that authority is profoundly challenged.  As our very rigid, binaried understandings of the role of author in relation to the reader erode and disappear, the influences of social power that privileged the authorial role also disappear.  By demonstrating that writing itself is social and conversational, students can access a means to change the social environment in which they are conversing by claiming an authorship role for themselves.

Conclusion

Ultimately, writing is most meaningful when it is used as a means of communication with and participation in the world at large.  It is difficult to bring students to a place where they can understand this social nature of writing in a practical way.  The complicated author/reader role in digital writing provides the perfect platform from which to launch a student’s exploration of writing as a social act.  Incorporating digital writing into the classroom offers students an opportunity to understand and also participate in social writing genres in ways that challenge their current understandings of the roles of readers and authors.  If that challenge is successful, it will empower students to claim the role of author as their own and use their writing to contribute meaningfully to the world in which they live.

References:

Bakhtin, M.M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. Caryl Emerson. MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Print.

Bakhtin, M.M., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.Trans. Vern W. McGee. TX:University of Texas Press, 1986. Print.

Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Reading and Writing as Social Acts.” Introductory Talk. Indiana Teachers of Writing Spring Seminar. May 1983. Address.

Kress, Gunther. “Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning.” Computers and Composition 22. (2005): 5-22. Print.

Losh, Elizabeth. Virtualpolitik. MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009. Print.

Ludwig, Teresa Marie. A study of Ann Berthoff’s composition theory. MA Thesis. Iowa State University, 1987. Web. 11 March 2015.

Digital Writing Assignment Ideas!

This is my third post in a mini-series of posts I am writing on 21st century literacies in the modern high school classroom.  My first post explored the idea behind what it means for a student to be literate in today's post-high school environment, focusing on the roles of technology and globalization in current academic and career workplaces.  My second post focused on digital writing in particular, discussing the worth and complexity involved in rhetorically sophisticated digital composition as well as how those digital compositions can be used to teach writing in the classroom. For this post, I'd like to lighten up the heavy mental lifting for a bit and discuss some practical and accessible assignment ideas for bringing digital writing into the classroom.  I found several of these ideas in Joan Lange, Patrick Connolly, and Devin Lintzenich's article in the English Journal; their article stresses the idea that digital assignments "build essential skills for success in college: developing curious minds and an ability to analyze and synthesize ideas to communicate insights with an audience."  Their article focuses exclusively on the use of digital writing in teaching Shakespeare; however, their assignments are relevant for use with most readings!

  • Text Message Paraphrases - This assignment asks students to select a portion of a play or dialogue in a novel and paraphrase the conversation into a text message conversation.  Emojis and gifs are fair game.  The goal is to have students connect with the literary dialogue and make it their own by putting the words into a conversational diction in which they are fluent and comfortable communicating.  This activity encourages close, careful reading of a text as well as exploration of tone and emotion behind the words being said.  It also makes sometimes removed or complicated texts feel real, personal, and relatable.
  • Facebook Profile Page for a Literary Character - In this assignment, the teacher will have created or found a Facebook profile page template.  Students have to choose a character and create a profile as if they were that character, selecting which bands they like, their favorite quotes, a profile picture, and their bio.  Lange explains that "this exercise challenges students to emulate tone and diction associated with a character."  It also pushes students to insightfully analyze an author's characterization in order to make decisions and assumptions as to what that character would like or dislike, who their friends would be, or what they would sound like.  Jane Mathison Fife has actually written about how Facebook pages are fairly sophisticated meaning-making devices, making strategic appeals and communicating messages about an individual to a wide audience.  She holds that using Facebook as a classroom tool in order to get students thinking critically about the strategic, communicative functions of social media has the potential to connect the study of literature and rhetoric with their daily lives. This assignment asks students to perform a literary analysis of a character within the situational context of a popular and familiar social media site. (The esteemed Megan of Breaking Grad(School) has shared this perfectly suited Facebook profile page template for classroom use with this assignment!)
  • Tweet a Summary - Any tweet on Twitter cannot exceed 140 characters.  This is a fairly limiting constraint; and yet, Twitter is frequently used to express complex political, philosophical, or social sentiments.  In this assignment, students are asked to summarize a recent reading in one paragraph.  Once this has been completed, students are asked to review their summary and condense it into a tweet.  This tweet would capture the main idea and heart of the reading in 140 characters. This asks students to identify the main message or purpose in a composition and put it into their own words in a conversational genre with which they are very comfortable and familiar.

Lange's article discusses many of these digital writing assignments as helpful pre-writing activities.  They encourage students to slow down, search for textual clues and connotations, elaborate on their ideas about a text, and develop complex, textually-supported trains of thought that they can then proceed to use in more traditional writing assignments.  When working with students who are not particularly comfortable with the text at hand, assignments like these, which rely heavily on literacies that students are fairly fluent in, can give students the confidence they need to wrestle authentically and connect with a new text.  These assignments also build digital and computer literacy, which, for high school students, is an increasingly invaluable skillset.  Not to mention, they just look like a ton of fun!

The Academic Value in Digital Writing

In my last post, I started a discussion on the 21st century literacies that modern students must acquire in order to be prepared for their post-high school lives.  These literacies require students to achieve flexibility and fluency with multimedia composition, technology, and collaborative writing.  In this post, I wanted to continue this discussion by taking a look at digital writing in particular.  Educating our students to read and write skillfully in digital forums equips them to meet the challenges of what the National Writing Project calls "our information-rich, high-speed, high-tech culture." Just so we're all starting on the same page, the National Writing Project defines digital writing as...

"compositions created with, and often times for reading or viewing on, a computer or other device that is connected to the Internet."  

This can include blogs, Facebook, twitter, emails, texting, and a wide range of social networking and media sites.  All of these forums I have just listed are entirely digital, but ask participants to engage in fairly complex and sophisticated rhetorical situations.  They are genres in their own rights, requiring students to think critically about their choices as readers and writers.  Despite the complexity of these digital writing genres as well as their increasing importance in today's career and academic spheres, they are often dismissed in the high school classroom as unimportant, nonacademic, and distracting.

I would like to offer up a few reason as to why I believe that digital writing should not be dismissed, but rather encouraged as a tool with immense potential to help equip our students with modern and relevant literacies in the 21st century.

1) As teachers, one of our goals is to get students writing or reading in their daily lives.  I have witnessed a wide variety of strategies and even outright bribes on the parts of teachers engaging in the very noble attempt to infuse their students' lives with reading and writing.  Meanwhile, seemingly unnoticed, reading and writing in the digital spheres has permeated adolescent life extensively.  A new study by the Pew Research Center found that the average teen sends 60 texts a day. Internet Live Stats has a live and running count of how many Google searches were performed each day and the number is regularly well into the 3-4 billions.  Facebook's Newsroom stats show that, in December of 2014, they logged approximately 890 million daily active users, all of whom were reading and writing social interactions.  As Kathleen Yancey points out, "Note that no one is making anyone do any of this writing." I'm not entirely sure anyone needs too much convincing on this front, but teens are reading and writing somewhat constantly in digital forms.  Let's harness that.

2) Despite the fact that faculty and students alike disregard digital and social reading and writing as recreational and often detrimental with regards to student literacy, most digital writing platforms actually provide particularly unique and complex communicative situations that have the potential to carry real value into non-digital genres.  Twitter's 140-character limit could be considered to be a fairly advanced exercise in precision and conciseness in composition.  Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook's hashtag culture provides a very unique glimpse into the function of audience in our composition and how awareness of that audience shapes our compositions.  The dialogical structure of emails and forum sites presents a unique opportunity to explore the social nature of writing.  Texting, which relies heavily on emojis and gifs, provides a very interesting glimpse into the flexibility and functionality of multimodality in our compositions.  All of these composition exercises are fairly advanced and, with correct channeling, can serve to enrich and deepen students' overall skills in composition and reading.

3)  One of the things that sets digital writing genres apart from traditional print texts is the incredibly collaborative community in which this writing takes place.  The previously mentioned Krista Kennedy has said, “the simple fact that digital spaces do not require human bodies to be present in the same place at the same time opens up additional possibilities for all collaboration types.”  Blog posts, social networking sites, and academic forums all engage in worldwide, collaborative writing.  Returning to the NCTE's definition of 21st century literacies from my opening post, students must be able to "build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively."  Digital writing creates an incredibly powerful platform from which to launch students' ability to work collaboratively and cross-culturally.

4) Teaching reading or composition using digital writing is not necessarily a departure from already existing reading or composition teaching methods; it merely offers a unique and effective tool to help students gain valuable experience in necessary modern literacies.  While the unique affordances of digital writing genres create new opportunities for creativity in composition and collaboration, the ability to assess a rhetorical situation, compose a response, and then engage in an ongoing dialogue is and remains a fundamental concept in the writing process.

The ways in which digital writing can be brought into the classroom are numerous and oftentimes more accessible that it first seems.  It would be unrealistic and overwhelming to suggest that ELA teachers everywhere overhaul their lesson plans so that they take place in digital realms.  Much more reasonably, current teachers could begin to slowly incorporate these increasingly necessary skills into their already existing curricula, adding a low-stakes digital assignment or a digital option for an assignment into their lesson plans.  The important point here is to start somewhere in helping align our classroom assignments and environments with the real world challenges our students are going to face.

An Exploration of Literacy in the 21st Century

As high school English teachers, one of our major goals is to create literate students, equipped with flexible and complex writing and composition skills.  We want students to enter colleges and workplaces with a certain competence in formulating and articulating their thoughts, responses, and ideas.  But, in our current era of digital, globalized communication and technological workspaces, what does writing even mean anymore?  What does it mean to teach composition to modern students in ways that prepare them to function expertly in today's society? In their 2013 position statement, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), took a stab at answering those questions by attempting to define what it means to be literate in the 21st century.  Their definition pays close attention to the ways in which technology in particular has complicated the idea of literacy for our students, creating a need for students with multiple literacies capable of meeting the diverse needs of today's diverse society and culture. Their definition goes on to explain that...

"Active, successful participants in this 21st century global society must be able to

    • Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;
    • Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;
    • 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 multimedia texts"

The overall theme here and elsewhere is that writing is becoming increasingly screen-based.  Creating literate students, skilled in writing and composition, in the 21st century necessarily involves incorporating technology and digital writing.  Understanding this more complicated view of modern literacy creates an infinite number of new possibilities for writing pedagogy in the high school classroom.  Krista Kennedy points out that "the need to create assignments that reflect the reality of contemporary writing environments remains a pressing pedagogical concern, along with the need to prepare students for workplaces that are increasingly reliant on digital, global communication, and collaborative labor."  As high school teachers developing curricula and assignments intended to prepare our students for their post-high school lives, we need to allow this evolving understanding of 21st century literacies to shape the pedagogical choices we are making.  Digital writing genres such as blogs, twitter, email, and forums are now academic and rhetorical composition situations with which a literature student must be comfortable and confident.  Our assignments must increasingly focus on developing discerning creators and interpreters of multimodal compositions, including composition using images, sounds, and video.  Regardless of our comfort level with the idea, literacy for today's high school students means something different than it has meant historically.  In order to best serve our students, we as teachers have to adapt our expectations and classroom designs to meet this new understanding of a literate individual.

Over my next few blog posts, I'm going to be exploring some possibilities as to what it looks like to bring this 21st century definition of literacy into the high school English classroom.  I am planning on posting some of my research and ideas surrounding digital writing in the classroom as well as a few of the multimodal projects I have been working on as part of my graduate coursework.  My goal is to share some of my exploration into what literacy looks like for modern high school students and to join in the ongoing conversation of educators who are working through the complications of this new and rich pedagogical landscape.  As always, please do comment, ask questions, criticize, and/or correct!

How to Suffocate American Diversity: A Case Study

A particularly inspirational fellow teacher and blogger, Rusul Alrubail, posted recently in response to this article.  I found her post and this article to be so relevant and so heartbreaking that I wanted to dedicate my ever-so-tiny and modest far corner of the internet to this issue for a moment. The spark notes version of this article features a school in New York's foreign language department that arranged for the US Pledge of Allegiance to be recited over the announcements in a different language each day for one week.  After the day in which a school student recited the pledge in Arabic, the school received a barrage of complaints from students and parents.  Complaints ranged from individuals saying that they had lost family in the war in Afghanistan to the sentiment that it was disrespectful to the Jewish members of the school body.  The school issued an apology and declared that the pledge would only ever be read in English in the future.

Because that's America now.  You're welcome to be here, so long as you promise not to contribute any notable ethnic diversity or nonwhite culture to our system.

I have a few, fairly separate, but mercifully brief points that I would like to make in response to this.

1)  The people of Afghanistan do not speak Arabic.  Dari and Pashto are the primary languages.  But kudos on engaging in such a thorough and consistent level of ignorance.

2)  When we start designating languages as representative of racial conflicts that are distinct to both a specific time and location, we are going to have to make some serious system changes.  The day Arabic is offensive to the Jewish population is also the day that we will unfortunately have to start eyeing German suspiciously.

3)  If anyone thinks that the brave men and women who give and have given their lives in the service of this country do so in order for us to have the freedom to limit the cultural heritage and expression of school children attempting to participate and engage in American ideals, I take extreme offense to that.

I hope students everywhere feel that they can explore their identities as Americans in light of their cultural heritage.  This is one of the factors that has made and does make America a great nation.  My heart breaks for the students who see their identities as Americans forcibly divorced from and opposed to their cultural, racial identities.

"What makes you American is not the language you speak, but the ideas you believe in" - Andrew Zink